DO any of you generate Stats and Graphs for the bosses or the bean counters?
If so on or about what?
Have you noticed that they like any type of Graph better or found a certain style easier to understand quickly?
Thanks all
7 Spice ups
robertbp
(DrJohnZoidberg)
2
I assume you mean about IT things? Use the reports - they rock plus you can customize them in all sorts of ways.
3 Spice ups
yes I mean IT things.
But do you do a report on how much of your budget you spent with X supplier.
Or Items that you replaced vs new purchases.
I am Trying to get an idea of what i should give/offer management, as opposed to bombarding them with unessential information.
I’ve worked for a school for a long time and developed my own way of doing things. In part because i had no one to show me what is expected, and in part because the school is vague on what they want reports and stats on.
Mainly it’s a case of “if it works” we are happy and “why did it break”. but I want to be more proactive about things. Start motivating for Improvements before they are needed, not being behind IT Trends, IT teaching Trends.
We had no asset register, we did not keep track of purchase price or age or who supplied it nor did we have a ticket system, we now have spiceworks.
Now i want to start reporting and presenting Graphs and stats.
But i dont know about or on what.
robertbp
(DrJohnZoidberg)
4
I think I understand. I work at a college as the sole IT guy so I’m in a similar position.
Don’t give them technical things they wont understand unless it’s asked for.
Something I’ve found that works is to have an IT ‘file.’ In it I have a printed network map, inventory lists, software agreements, service provider overviews, etc. As I put it together I showed my boss what it all was & where it’s kept. He doesn’t understand most of it, but he’s happy there’s a record plus it looks good. 
1 Spice up
robertbp
(DrJohnZoidberg)
5
We don’t have a dedicated budget for IT as we are a (very) small branch. If something breaks or I’m worried, I tell my boss, get a few quotes & he makes the decision.
From time to time I go tell him what I’ve been up to & ask if anything’s broken - lets him know I’m actually working, not surfing the net all day 
1 Spice up
We have a pie-chart on display, showing what percentage of students were without a “portable learning device” (laptop) because they were away for repair. From April 9th - May 15th, this figure was 1.11%
go team
1 Spice up
skillet
(Skillet)
7
I know that my boss runs a couple of the reports in SW every now and then, and gives that info to her boss. I think it just pertains to how many tickets we are taking care of, and the number of tickets that stay open for longer than 4 days.
guy not sure if this will help but i was just researching a company called idashboards.com
Thanks.
That Idashboards look very interesting.
alex3031
(Alex3031)
10
Darius what metrics do you want to look at. If you want to be proactive especially gettign the school to invest in IT upgrade and infrastructure then I think you will need more than just your stats, and the stats you are going to want to look at are ROI, the cost of not maintaining an upgrade schedule, how you compare to other schools (bonus if you compare it to a school that has a better rep than yours) Operational costs. etc… In general what “management” needs to see in order to invest is the value to them or the company, in this case the school (district), town and taxpayers. In order to do this you need to show them how things can be improved and why they should be and how it will save the taxpayers money over time, etc… Those are the stats you want to focus on.
Graphs and charts are great because it is a quick way to visually see the data, it also makes big difference far more noticeable. I find when comparing sets of data a 3D bar graph works well, and when running percentages broken out pie graph is great. Finally for trending data a line graph usually works the best.
idashboard looks interesting … currently evaluating SAP crystal reports server which seems to have good reporting and dashboard seems …
but any web based dashboard similar to idahsboard on LAN will be definately gr8 becoz in general managment dasboards and KPI are confidential info which may be preferred by management to keep on local servers…
Never get any opensource although
Hi,
Just to inform that i have downloaded and installed the enterprise version of idashboard and it seems to be quite easy and interface looks good. I think thats what CEO/ CFO are looking but not sure about prices and still checking how to integrate with orace db.
But once u have the report exported in csv its easy to present the data in charts to management.
Has anyone tried connecting iDashboards to Spiceworks’ DB? I am currently evaluating iDashboards and would love to bring SW data into the mix. So far, I really like iDashboards. As an added bonus, I get a very close look and a better understanding of our data (different systems and locations) in terms of how it’s stored, what’s linked to what, etc.
Dotan
I do a monthly report on all IT stuff. I use pie charts and bar graphs whenever I can. These are generated through Excel, but some of the info is pulled from SW.