How is your Service Desk performing? What are the bottlenecks? What can be improved? In our last blog article, Continual Service Improvement, we described how Reporting & Analytics, the “Third Pillar” of our NITRO™ application layer, can help you understand “where you’re at, where you’ve been, and where you need to go” in terms of your company’s performance.
Good Data Means Good Reports
The first two pillars of our NITRO™ application layer, UI/UX and Workflows & Processes, are where the data used in reports is entered and processed: An end user creates a request or ticket, filling in various data fields; relevant data can be pulled into the request from outside sources; the ticket is further annotated during its initial processing and assignment. As the work is being done to resolve the ticket or fulfill the request, more data is gathered.
When multiple tickets and tasks, along with asset and equipment records or outside databases, are used during processing, the dataset grows even larger and more complex.
Fortunately, the movement of all data within Crow Canyon applications is meticulously tracked and recorded, allowing a full dataset to be available to the reporting tools.
Variety – the Spice of Life, even in Reporting
All this data can provide useful reports, but what report to show and how to show it depends on who the report is for and what information that person needs to see. For example, Service Desk staff working the tickets need real-time dashboards and gauges to view workloads and queue status. Managers might need to look at historical trends to guide decision-making as to staff sizing and Service Desk performance.
In Crow Canyon’s NITRO™ application layer for SharePoint and Office 365, we offer many types of reports and many ways to display them. Dashboards can show a variety of real-time data, usually as numerical counts, tiles, and gauges. Workspace pages can show a selection of relevant reports along with lists, libraries, and other content. But the primary place of reporting activity is in the reporting tools themselves, with the two main ones being our Report Manager and Microsoft’s PowerBI. We will explore these tools in-depth in future blog articles. Rest assured that these tools will more than cover your reporting needs!
Using Data for Insightful Reports
Crow Canyon’s NITRO™ application layer enables your organization to access large amounts of data and then visualize that data in a highly configurable manner, all in the familiar environment of Microsoft SharePoint / Office 365.
Some dimensions that you can build reports on, based on the application used, include:
- IT Help Desk: Status of tickets, ticket assignments, quantities, priorities, overdue tickets;
- Asset Management: Asset status, usage, maintenance needs, financial data, procurement;
- Security Access Requests: Who has access, what level of access they have, who approved the access, when it was granted, detailed access auditing;
- Procurement: Costs by department/category, financial control reporting, outstanding/overdue requests, approval auditing;
- Human Resources: Leave requests, benefits paid, HR request auditing, time spent, employee status reports, onboarding.
This kind of functionality boosts the native power of SharePoint and Office 365 to the next level. Our applications seamlessly integrate with both of these Microsoft environments, enabling you to quickly add business critical functionality without writing one snippet of code. This tight integration means that Microsoft and Crow Canyon functionalities reside side-by-side, working together to bring powerful business solutions to your favorite collaborative environment.
The NITRO™ layer truly boosts your Microsoft SharePoint and/or Office 365 experience by transforming them into true business application platforms.
Learn More
Want to learn more about how our solutions can help your company engage with your customers and/or users? Give us a call at 1-888-706-0070 or contact us by e-mail at sales@crowcanyon.com
