Mid-size IT organizations become empowered with Dashboards

According to a recent survey conducted by Innotas with a leading technology publication, over 49 percent of mid-size IT organizations are still using Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet to report on IT project statuses and to visualize data with the integrated chart function in Excel. When IT organizations are asked to support faster changing business needs, act as innovation enablers, and provide visibility into their approach to project portfolio management, they need better tools.

Dashboards have become a ubiquitous and easy-to-use information visualization tool that compile and present performance indicators and metrics in an easy-to-digest way. They provide tactical and executive management with condensed information in real-time to empower faster and more accurate decision-making, as well as deliver relevant information to external stakeholders such as customers, governance boards, and investors.

The ease-of-use with which dashboards can be set up and customized in IT solutions such as Innotas’ Project Portfolio Management solution makes them a critical performance tracking and decision-making tool for any IT organization.

Delivering Visibility and Improving Decision Making

Are you asking yourself daily: “What’s the status of a specific project?” or “How much time is being spent on another project?” but are usually afraid to dig through spreadsheets to find the information? A properly set-up dashboard can provide this kind of information in real-time with a click of the ‘refresh’ button. Dashboards are all about visibility and transparency across an IT organization’s portfolio. Here are some of the benefits that dashboards provide to any IT organization:

• Deliver greater visibility into statuses and metrics for projects, requests, budgets, and applications with the click of a button.

• Reduce reporting errors that occur through manual report-keeping and preparation in spreadsheets and other antiquated tools.

• Provide critical IT metrics and other information to tactical and executive management in real-time.

• Enable faster and more accurate decision-making for IT projects, resources, and budgets.

• Share relevant data and metrics with anyone, anytime, and anywhere.

• Make large amounts of IT project data easily accessible through visualization.

As part of a comprehensive, integrated Project Portfolio Management, dashboards are a critical IT management tool that drive greater transparency and agility in IT organizations.

Dashboards

Cloud Solutions for IT Management

SOLUTION BRIEF

Here is a list of recom-mended dashboards that any IT organization should have:

• Executive, top-down dashboards across the portfolio

• Business customer dashboards

• Performance dash-boards for measuring project, application, and portfolio performance

• Governance dash-boards for prioritizing the portfolio and viewing the pipeline

Must-have Dashboards for IT Organizations

CIO Cockpit

Innotas111 Sutter Street, Suite 300San Francisco, CA 94104Tel: +1.415.263.9800Toll-free: 1.866.692.7362www.innotas.com - info@innotas.com

About Innotas: Innotas provides a ground-breaking cloud-based IT Governance solution—an easy-to-use, rapid-to-deploy and cost-effective way to manage resources and budgets across an IT department’s entire inventory of projects, portfolios, applications, assets and service requests. With its strong foundation in Project Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management, Innotas provides CIOs and IT management with visibility across both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations for improved decision making across the entire IT portfolio.

Cloud Solutions for IT Management

Any dashboard in Innotas can be published to a public URL. This public URL can be linked from within a portal or a website, or from a collaboration solution such as SharePoint.

And since all data from within Innotas is accessible through dashboards, the publishing option provides true visibility into all work being managed in Innotas.

Innotas hosts the files and provides access code security, so all one needs to do is click the link and view the data.

How does public sharing work?

“It is a huge benefit being able to produce reports on-demand with Innotas for senior manage-

ment about what we are working on, instead of having to go through emails to find the

necessary information.”

- Jim Cook, IT Project Manager

Ferris State University

Copyright ©2012, Innotas. All rights reserved. Innotas is a trademark of Innotas, a California company. Other names used herein may be trade-marks of their respective owners. Innotas_DS_Dashboards_2012-03-21

Share any dashboard with anyone, anytime, and anywhere

Today’s business environment requires that more information be shared with organizations, teams, and stakeholders outside of the IT organization. Therefore it is important to share any dashboard with anyone, anywhere, and anytime upon request. Innotas solves this dilemma by providing the ability to publish dashboards from within Innotas to any public forum or website. This delivers metrics in a read-only format to management, customers, company boards, and other interested parties.

Public sharing of Innotas dashboards is an easy-to-use option for providing visibility without the hassle of managing and maintaining read-only users in the Innotas solution or giving data access to management prior to the data being ready. With publishable public dashboards, the portfolio, project, and application owners can ensure that only accurate and up-to-date information is shared. Additionally, rather than asking management and stakeholders to log into the Innotas solution, public sharing provides a variety of options for delivering important information in a manner that is in alignment with your organizational processes and can utilize existing infrastructure such as intranets and portals.

Innotas Dashboards – Ready to go and easily customizable

With Innotas, you have access to a full range of dashboards for portfolio management, resource management, strategic IT management, project management, and request management. Here is more detail on the dashboard functionality included in the Innotas solution:

• Visualize data in pie charts, bubble charts, bar charts, and more.

• Create new dashboards from scratch or customize any pre-built dashboards.

• Define visibility of dashboards (personal, team, public).

• Use any data set or report to create a dashboard.

• Add as many dashboards as you need.

• Drill-down option for each dashboard.Project Management Dashboard