Supernova Award Category

The Problem

At Intuit, we put a large emphasis on delivering ‘awesomeness’ through our solutions - or in other words: an amazing user experience. In IT, this translates to business and IT services that are reliable, robust and delightful for internal business stakeholders. At the same time and like many IT organizations, we are also cost conscious and constantly leverage automation and analytics to make our organization efficient and effective with limited resources. To support us with this mission, in June 2014, we deployed ServiceNow, specifically to streamline IT processes and systems. While we got great efficiencies from automating our processes, we were limited in our ability to gain insights from the data that was being captured. This data had the potential to answer key questions such as which IT services are responsible for outages in business services, and what types of incidents are consistently missing SLAs. However, we couldn’t conduct such analyses easily and relied on a patchwork of handwritten queries, spreadsheets and desktop databases. Our business users were constantly asking for new analyses and self-service mechanisms to build their own dashboards, as simple reporting and spreadsheets were not providing them the key insights. In addition, our team was deluged with requests for generating sophisticated analytics that took away their time from investigating issues and coming up with ways to continually improve performance.

The Solution

As the questions being asked varied and analyses being requested required data integration, manipulation, aggregation and visualizations, we realized we needed a data warehouse and Business Intelligence solution. However, we didn’t want to undertake a multimillion dollar BI/DW project ourselves as our job was to deliver best IT services and not build such analytic systems.

We started looking for a solution that embodied best-in-class analytic technology and included content that was reflective of best practices in IT service management. As we had deployed a packaged operational application for our processes, we also wanted an analytic solution that was pre-packaged and cloud-based. We wanted the ability to slice and dice data using a visual tool too, so that our business users were self-sufficient and were able to conduct their own analyses without encumbering my team.

We identified Numerify as a powerful, cloud-based analytics application that reflected IT domain best practices.

The results

Today, with Numerify bolted on top of our IT service management system, Intuit’s analytics capabilities paint a clear picture of the root cause of incidents and provide key insights into the broad impact of business applications. Numerify helps us pull a number of reports with much more visibility and granularity that we were just not able to do either using operational reports or through SQL, spreadsheets and desktop database. Just one network analyses showed dependencies between IT and business services and how outages in one were impacting the other. The powerful network graph visualization made it possible to spot outliers and areas where more investigation was needed. We can rank which services have suffered outages and incidents and for what duration these services were degraded. We don’t have to hunt through reams of data or comb through tables, nor are we spending valuable hours trying to build the reports. Additionally, we were able to hone in on specific infrastructure issues affecting business users and build reports that identify costs for top drivers in communication and change management, bringing more value to the help desk.

Metrics

Numerify will definitely save time. There’s no question about that. We were able to save hundreds of hours that our team was spending in extracting data, joining tables and building reports for business users. The same time is being used for more data analyses, interpretation and identify fixes. We also avoided spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in BI tool, database and ETL licenses that would have been required if we were to implement a robust analytics solution ourselves. We have already seen improvements in service desk metrics like backlog, Total open work, MTTR, reassignment rates and for services metrics like % downtime and degradation durations.

The Technology

Numerify’s solution gives us the ability to analyze and generate insight with a more complete view of IT systems, enabling our engineering team to spend more time on critical IT work and less time on reporting. We get full-featured BI functionality that is integrated and accessible via our ServiceNow instance, combined with an underlying cloud-based data warehouse.

Disruptive Factor

Not everyone values metrics and deep-rooted analytics as a top priority in business today, particularly as you can’t always see the direct impact and value at the customer level; so changing the mindset at Intuit and making the case for investment into an IT-focused business analytics offering was the most difficult challenge. However, there is an opportunity to educate our colleagues on the value of having analytics and gaining insight into implementations, understanding how to prioritize work and identifying any missing pieces to streamline IT operations. Overall, the analytics application has helped to position us better and make the best use of all of our IT resources, with better understanding into which assets are generating the most costly incidents and the most regular incidents, enabling us to become much more efficient with IT operations and how we deliver what services we deliver.

The internal disruption was for IT folks to realize the irony that we were not leveraging analytics to analyze our own business, while being responsible for these very solutions for other parts of the business. The other game-changing aspect of adopting pre-built solutions is that we get value within a matter of few weeks, as against building a solution like this ourselves, which would have taken several months.

Shining Moment

The best part is not just that we had simple reports that we weren’t able to create until Numerify. It’s that when we use this system, it allows us to think about data differently and connect dots. As the solution enables veasy-to-do, ad-hoc reporting and all visualizations are shown on the fly, you get instant feedback about whatever you search, allowing you to discover new things and prompting you to look at data more deeply for continued business success.