Column

Simplicity is the Key

TEXT: WOLTER SMIT

The desire to generate useful reports is one of the most important reasons to purchase a facilities or IT service management solution. It is also a logical one. Good reports provide quantitative insight into what is going on, which is useful when declaring accountability to management at higher levels. Fortunately, TOPdesk shines with advanced reporting options, which provide numerous options. Firstly, reports are simple to create and save in TOPdesk and, secondly, you can easily make them available for managers or other concerned parties, if desired. The most important and unique advantage of reports in TOPdesk, however, is that you can jump directly from a quantitative report to the qualitative data. In other words, you can go straight from a summary of incident totals to the underlying incidents in order to analyze or process them further. In practice, we often see fervent reporting desires quickly fade away after an implementation even though these desires had a big influence on the configuration of the application. For example, some organizations enter so many categorizations that their operators no longer know how best to classify incidents. This leads to reports that are lacking in clarity, which in turn, diminishes the desire to have good reports. It can complicate things a lot more than is necessary. Ideally, the implementation should be as straightforward and intuitive as possible, so that operators can begin handling incidents as soon as possible. From experience, we have seen that a simple configuration can indeed produce insightful reports. If, in time, it becomes apparent that certain perspectives are lacking, it is relatively easy to add them at a later stage. Luckily, TOPdesk is not so rigid that you cannot improve upon decisions made in the past. I wish you much reporting pleasure Wolter Smit is one of two Managing Directors at TOPdesk

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