Report Over All Support Domains

Nearly all enterprise organizations that use 4me now have a directory account with multiple support domain accounts.  Some have just two support domains – one for IT and another for HR.  But there are already several 4me customers with well over 20 support domain accounts.  These enterprises may, for example, have an IT department in a various countries, multiple HR departments, a shared services organization for finance, a global marketing team, etc.

To make it possible for these enterprises to generate reports using data from several of these support domains (e.g. from all HR departments), the ‘Reports’ and ‘Dashboards’ sections of the Analytics console are now also available in directory accounts.

The reports that can be found in the ‘Reports’ section are essentially the same as the ones that are available in a support domain account.  In a directory account, though, the reports have an additional checkbox that allows the results to be grouped by support domain account.

When this box is checked, a bar chart instantly becomes a stacked bar chart and the presentation of a numeric report that only shows a single number transforms into a pie chart.  If the box is checked above a pie chart, it changes into a horizontal bar chart.

By default, placing a checkmark in this box splits the report’s data into 4 groups; the 3 support domains that have the most data in the report, plus 1 group that contains the rest of the data.  That last group is marked as ‘Other’.

The ‘Other’ group will not be presented when there are only 3 or fewer support domains which data is included in the report.  It is possible to change the ‘top 3’ to a different number to reduce or increase the number of groups that the data is split into.

The directory account’s reports also offer a filter that is not available in the reports of support domain accounts.  This filter is called ‘Support domain account’.  By filtering a report by support domain account, it is possible to, for example, show only the numbers for the enterprise’s IT departments.

Now that it is possible to combine data from multiple support domains in a single report, the next step is to use some of these reports to prepare dashboards for senior management.  This is done in the ‘Dashboards’ section of the directory account’s Analytics console.  The filters of the dashboards that are created there can be defined to focus on specific areas of the enterprise.

A dashboard for the CIO could, for example, show the number of service outages (i.e. top-impact requests) that are currently affecting the business, without having to think about which support domain these incidents are registered in.

After preparing a dashboard, it can be shared securely using a shareable dashboard URL.  Alternatively, managers can be given the Directory Auditor role so that they can use the shared dashboards in the directory account.  Having the Directory Auditor role also makes it possible to run individual reports and drill down into the records that are included in these reports.