The ServiceNow Performance Analytics Dashboard That Executives Actually Read
The head of IT operations at a Central European bank called me last autumn with a complaint I have heard so often I now expect it. His team had spent nine months and roughly €180k building out ServiceNow Performance Analytics. Sixty-two dashboards, four hundred and eleven indicators, weekly scorecards emailed to the executive committee. The complaint was that nobody read any of it. The CFO admitted in a steering committee that he had not opened a single one. The COO opened them for the first fifteen seconds of the executive meeting and then asked her assistant to summarise. The CEO had never logged in. This is not a technology problem. Performance Analytics does everything it says on the tin. The problem is that most ServiceNow Performance Analytics deployments confuse producing metrics with producing decisions, and executives at the top of a business are only interested in the second one. If your dashboards are being ignored, the fix is not a nicer visualisation library or a bigger screen in the boardroom. The fix is admitting that the reports you built were designed for the analyst who built them, not for the person who was supposed to act on them.