ServiceNow vs. “Service! Now!”: Why data analytics teams should operate like the IT service desk
Manage expectations by responding rather than reacting
If you’ve been a data practitioner for longer than a week, someone has come up to your desk — if your corporate overlords have forced you back into an office, except now you don’t even have your own desk, or if you worked in an office pre-pandemic — and asked, “Could you just get these numbers for me real quick? Super Important White Guy needs them.” The most generous interpretation of this zero-notice request goes something like, “Oh, the stakeholders just don’t understand what’s involved in getting the data.” Cry me a river.
Requests come at analytics teams from every direction and by all manner of methods of communication, and many of them are “urgent.” They include the greatest hits like, “the data on this dashboard is wrong!” or “I need these charts from Tableau on PowerPoint slides for a meeting in two hours.”
Regardless of what you decide to infer about the requesters or your company based on the volume of ad-hoc requests you receive, learnings must be gleaned and integrated in order to to improve your data team’s effectiveness. They fall into two categories, generally: self-service analytics strategy and intake processes.
