"When was the last time you sent a report that directly led to a decision? Not acknowledged; not read. When did it actually change something?"

This was the question that Micah Armstrong, IT manager at UT Dallas, posed to a standing room only audience at HDI Service & Support World during his session, “From Data to Decisions: Creating Impactful Reports for Service Management.” Nobody raised their hand.

“You don’t want to be data rich and insight poor,” Armstrong says. “You have the data, but you’ve got to find the insight.”

This can be tricky because our industry has built an entire culture around data in IT service management. We track contacts, reopen rates, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, handle time, blah, blah, blah. But most of the time, no matter how good the report looks, nobody does anything differently because of it.

Armstrong thinks this is because too many reports are bloated with data and are visually confusing. When he’s putting together a report, he decides which data point gets in by asking himself this question: If this number goes up or down, what will someone do differently? If he can’t answer that question, he doesn’t include the data point.

“A report to be useful needs to influence a decision, a conversation or direction,” Armstrong says. “You also have to accept that you can’t serve everyone in your organization with one report. Nobody knows what to look at.”

He talked about what each stakeholder group wants to know:

• Executives want a few KPIs. Are we meeting our commitments? Is there something I need to be concerned about? “They’re looking for assurance because they’re making big decisions and don’t want to dive into individual ticket details,” Armstrong says.
• Managers want friction. Where’s something taking a long time? How are my agents performing? Are customers happy? “This lets me know what needs to be prioritized next,” Armstrong says.
• Frontline staff want the real-time data. What’s the priority? What’s coming next? “They want to know what’s happening right now,” Armstrong says.

When putting together the report, it’s important to understand the difference between activity metrics and insight metrics. A quick review:

• An activity metric tells you what happened. Tickets opened, calls answered, calls missed.
• An insight metric tells you what it means. First contact resolution rate, reopen rate, aging tickets. These are the numbers that prompt a question or demand an action.

Both types matter, but the mistake most people make is leading with activity, when they should be leading with insight.

“If your handle time drops, your first instinct is to celebrate,” Armstrong says. “But then, you pair that with an insight metric to get more understanding. Even if your handle time went down, maybe your open rate tripled. Maybe you’re doing things faster, but that might not necessarily be a good thing.”

Pick the right visual

A “pretty” report is not a clear report, Armstrong says.

“We often think: ‘I need to make this report look really good. It needs to impress someone,’” Armstrong says. “But if you include too much — too many numbers, too many extras — it gets harder to read.”

He shared a few design tips:

• Trends over time go in a line chart. “Our brains are good at spotting movement over time,” Armstrong says. “Comparisons go in a bar or pie chart, but keep the pie to five or six categories maximum or it becomes impossible to read.”
• Make single KPIs as big as possible. “Don't hide it in a corner,” Armstrong says. “Don’t put it in a pie chart. The number is what’s important.”
• Use color deliberately. Red for bad, green for good, gray for neutral. Keep it simple.
• Clean it up. “Don’t try to prove how much data you have,” Armstrong says.
  “The goal is to make the answer clear.”

Justin Powell, a deskside support technician at Oklahoma State University, said that Armstrong’s presentation resonated with him because they’re both in higher education and use similar tools.

“He’s been using the ITSM for about five years and even though my college has had it for a few months, I enjoyed seeing the possibilities of what can be put into a report,” Powell says. “Because of this presentation, I’m going to use visual charts to help convey information better.”

Be a storyteller

You can’t guarantee that everyone reading your report will think through it the way you did. In fact, you can probably guarantee the opposite, Armstrong says. The best way to solve this problem is to write down what the report means.

“When I send my boss monthly reports, I include a couple of bullet points or a few sentences to summarize what’s going on,” Armstrong says. “This reduces a lot of the friction, misinterpretation and reactive follow-ups you get when someone starts looking at it.”

Borrow this structure: context first (here’s what we’re looking at and why it matters), insight in the middle (here’s what the trend is showing and what the gap is), direction at the end (here’s what we’re doing or not doing about it).

“The best report doesn’t just look pretty,” Armstrong says. “It makes someone say: ‘I know exactly what I need to do next.’”