Creating “a single point of truth”
Accurate and effective IT service reporting provides an organisation with a complete picture of service delivery, so IT can align with business objectives. Organisations striving to ‘create a single point of truth’ in order to improve service reporting should consider the following action points and recommendations.

• Minimise the number of fields by Identifying important and unnecessary fields
• Wherever possible, make fields drop downs rather than free text fields • Motivate supplier and support teams, for example by introducing ‘league tables’
• Carry out ‘spot checks’ to regularly monitor data quality
• Hold regular meetings with business customers to understand requirements and address problems • Define requirements and expectations more accurately and introduce targets with quality levels in SLAs
• Use ‘human judgement’ approach rather than ‘formula based’ approach where measuring business impact proves difficult or time consuming
• Aim to ‘manage the outcome’ rather than ‘micro manage the supplier’
• Define and agree a ‘near miss’ and ‘partial’ & full outages’ with stakeholders
• Produce different reports to meet the needs of different audiences
• Do not over complicate reports and keep information provided to a minimum
• Establish what report content is relevant and how much is required through conversations with audiences
• Accurate service reporting enables better decision making and improves the credibility of the IT department

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