Accelerate Your Business Performance With Modern IT Reports

In the modern age, your IT department is a part of your business’s core nerve center. Without it, your organization would fall apart pretty quickly.

But, akin to many other industries, the information technology sector faces the age-old issue of producing IT reports that boost success by helping to maximize value from a tidal wave of digital data. While integral to organizational success and development, without the ability to gain actionable insights from your most important insights, IT reporting could be considered somewhat of a fruitless exercise.

As head of IT, you may have heard the question, “How many support tickets did we get that month? And how fast were they resolved?” Without the capacity to answer such questions, your ability to support your IT department successfully will be hindered.

But in this digital age, dynamic modern IT analytics tools created with a state-of-the-art online reporting tool are here to help you provide viable answers to a host of burning departmental questions. The IT management report of today will help you make more informed, more powerful decisions, do your job effectively, and develop exciting new growth strategies.

To put the power of digital data reporting into perspective, we’ll explore the role of IT reporting, its numerous benefits, and a mix of real-life IT reports examples.

Let’s get started.

What Is An IT Report?

An IT report compiles an ensemble of IT KPIs tracked over a certain period to assess various situations related to project management, helpdesk issues such as ticket status and their resolution, or more financial-focused costs and revenue stats, among others.

Regardless of their nature, they deliver value to their readers and are supposedly impactful. They have to align with the company’s strategic objectives and priorities, therefore, their realization needs to be thought out. The purpose is not to track every statistic possible, as you risk being drowned in data and losing focus.

By understanding your core business goals and selecting the right key performance indicator (KPI) and metrics for your specific needs, you can use an information technology report sample to visualize your most valuable metrics at a glance, developing initiatives and making pivotal decisions swiftly and with confidence. By utilizing a modern dashboard creator, each report is easily visualized and provides advanced interactivity possibilities to explore and generate insights.

Information technology reports are the interactive eyes you need to help your department run more smoothly, cohesively, and successfully. Now we’re going to look at the reasons why this is the case.

Why Do You Need An IT Report?

When setting up a business strategy for your IT department, you need to craft a vision, identify goals to achieve, and a clear path of how to get there. IT reports are here to help you demonstrate at each stage of the way where you stand, and demonstrate the progress (or decline) accomplished so far – but also, the effect you have on that progress.

This is why it is highly important to report correctly. If what you are reporting does not align with the wider business objectives, you might end up driving the IT department – and sometimes even the rest of the business – further apart. Bad reporting can also endanger the budget initially settled.

What Are The Advantages of IT Reporting?

IT reporting has many benefits. Not only does it let you assess the current state of activities, to find out what is happening and where, but it also provides you with proof of it happening. Using IT analytics software is extremely useful in the matter: by gathering all your info in a single point of truth, you can easily analyze everything at once and create actionable IT dashboards. Thanks to their in-the-moment nature, you don’t need to struggle with permanent synchronization: all your data is always up-to-date. That is a considerable asset to understand easily the bits and bytes of your activity and turn those insights into informed business decisions.

IT dashboards, visualized through a professional online dashboard, come in handy because they give an idea of the current situation in a glimpse. Just like you would answer “I am a bit stressed” or “tired but happy” to someone asking how you feel, without giving them the blow-by-blow account of everything that happened throughout the week, a report gives a snapshot of the activities. It is a highly effective communication tool to grasp your team’s performance or collaborate together with coworkers.

To drive home the message of why you need an interactive IT report template and digital dashboard solutions for your technical departments, here is a concise summary of the business-boosting benefits:

1. Improved decision-making: The intuitive visual nature of digital reports fosters swifter, more informed decision-making across all key aspects of your IT department. Not only will you be able to make better senior choices relating to your department, but by empowering other members of your team to analyze and drill down into important metrics and insights with ease, you will accelerate your success significantly.

2. Inclusivity: Expanding on decision-making, as these kinds of dashboards and reports serve up digestible data visualizations, members of your IT department will be able to use these reporting solutions with ease, even under pressure. The graphical nature of such dashboards will also make it easy for you and your IT personnel to share insights with other departments effectively, without any key data getting lost in translation.

3. Agility: As every modern IT report template is fully customizable and offers access to every insight, online data visualization, or KPI from a centralized location across a multitude of mobile devices, it’s possible to gain access to invaluable IT-based knowledge 24/7. As the IT department is the lifeblood of any modern organization, this level of agile access to key insights will increase productivity and increase response times to unforeseen issues or technical problems.

4. Better business intelligence (BI): By accessing past, real-time, and predictive data with modern BI tools, you will enhance your IT department’s business intelligence capabilities ten-fold – pushing you ahead of the pack in the process. These kinds of informational hubs are designed for growth and evolution, and by embracing them, you will be able to make your IT department stronger than you ever thought possible.

5. Improved productivity and accuracy: In business, it's critical to provide the right knowledge at the right time. Whether it's ad hoc reporting in question or strategical analysis and development, the team needs to have access to the right insights at any time. By utilizing advanced reporting for IT processes, each team member can have access to data and immediately ask questions, share their findings, and create their own analysis. Moreover, by automating the delivery of insights on specific days of the week or month, productivity increases, and professionals can shift their focus from report creation to actionable insights.

6. Lower costs: Businesses need to lower their costs as much as possible and by creating an IT service report template, you can easily adjust each metric presented and use it for any of your future reports. This will enable you to save time and, consequently, costs that would otherwise be lost in endless static reports and outdated information. Speed is critical, and modern solutions help in centralizing all the data on a single point of access.

7. Confidence: Running an IT department is no easy feat. There are countless things to consider on a daily basis, not to mention long-term initiatives to focus on. With a modern tech report, you can take charge of your insights and improve departmental communication. In turn, this will give you greater direction, aptitude, and confidence.

IT Report Templates And Examples

As mentioned, technical-style reports are composed of a collection of KPIs aimed at analyzing specific parts of the IT department’s activities. Once you have defined what you want to measure, you can select the appropriate metrics and visualize them with an effective dashboard design.

These five IT report examples and their associated key performance indicators put the power of IT-based dashboards into a practical perspective.

Let’s start with our issue management IT report sample.

1. IT Issue Management Dashboard

This first IT report template deals with technical issue management and is especially useful for IT leaders.

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This particular IT report example indeed provides an overview of the overall problems happening in your system and lets everyone know what is happening and how often. The report displays the performance of 3 servers and tracks several metrics:

• the up- and downtime expressed as a percentage and in minutes
• the types of issues that occurred, the downtime they provoked, and the effort needed to repair them
• the number of support employees per thousand end-users
• the percentages of unsolved tickets per support agent

These metrics will help in identifying whether the issues are effectively managed and if the technical performance is on track. The point is to keep the system performance well maintained and such an IT operations report template can certainly help in the process. If you spot inefficiencies and higher amounts of issues, for example, from the DNS perspective, or hardware failure, you need to take a closer look at what happened and why. Another critical point is to look for the IT help employee per thousand end-users consistently since it will directly show whether your team needs additional assistance and if hiring new candidates makes sense.

Our next dashboard has a different IT focus, and that's related to costs.

2. IT Cost Dashboard

The second of our IT report examples tackles the financial management of the IT department.

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That is a crucial source of knowledge for decision-making as it provides top management and the financial department with accurate data on how the resources are used, for what, in which quantity, and the profit that you manage to make out of it all. It is split into four different KPIs:

• the return on investment (ROI) over a year, expressing the efficiency of IT investments
• a comparison of the IT spending versus its budget
• a breakdown of all the different costs involved in the management of the department
• a comparison of the costs and the revenue generated

These KPIs are showing a cost-related IT story and can provide you with building blocks for optimizing the current cost management. You can see that the ROI is generally great (more than 150%) and it steadily rises over time, which is the goal of every successful cost management strategy. By monitoring each of these cost-related metrics with the help of online data analysis, everyone in the IT team, finance department and management can have an immediate inside look at the monetary effectiveness of IT projects. That way, potential issues are immediately identified and resolved. For example, if you spot higher costs in your hardware or software section, you can easily investigate what happened and brainstorm ideas to reduce each cost as much as possible. Keep in mind to optimize based on business requirements but don't cut if there is no need for it or if it will affect the functioning of the IT department.

Our next report goes into detail about project management, critical in modern, technologically-driven companies.

3. IT Project Management Dashboard

Our third report template (excellent for use as an IT department monthly report sample) is an excellent asset when you need the right overview of your IT projects to supervise several activities at once.

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It tracks every task necessary to carry out your project, its evolution, where you stand at the moment, and what is delayed or needs action.  With this IT report example you can find:

• the total project budget compared to what has already been used and what is left
• the overdue tasks, the time-delayed, their original deadline, and the employee responsible for the task
• the workload on each employee’s shoulders, directly affecting their capacity to deliver a task on time
• the deadlines upcoming: who is in charge, what type of task, its deadline, and the workload percentage

This type of project management dashboard is specifically developed to accommodate many different IT-related tasks to deliver a successful project. A clear overview of the planning, design, development, and testing alongside the projected launch date will clearly show the stage where the team is currently working, and what kind of tasks and deadlines are overdue or upcoming. The project budget and the workload show a clear overview of the total budget, remaining, and who in the team has time to take on additional tasks and insights into the general organization. These kinds of business intelligence solutions help in optimizing metrics and automating many of the reporting processes. For example, you may notice that the workload of one team member is lower and you have the space to assign to him/her some overdue tasks that have a higher urgency level.

Our next template goes into strategic monitoring and development, useful for modern CTOs and CIOs.

4. CTO Report Template

Information technology reports for high-level executives have to include strategic planning and development for a longer period. CTOs have the task to manage multiple IT-related touchpoints and ensure that internal and external technological areas are aligned and have the potential to grow. That's why creating a report is critical in order to manage and deliver that same growth. Here we will present an IT monthly report template specifically designed for C-level management.

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You can immediately spot 4 focal points that CTOs have on their radar: the learning, internal, finance/customers, and user metrics crucial for strategic progress. The learning part is developed with the ticketing system and bug issues in mind as well as the development steadily and comparison with the previous month. Since the color-coding clearly shows whether there are issues or not (green indicating positive development while red that the metric needs attention), the CTO can assess the situation and dig deeper into the operational level of certain metrics.

On the right side, the internal area is delivering metrics on internal processes and how well the team manages the time between failures, repair, availability, downtime, and accuracy of estimates. In this case, you can see that there are certain matters that need adjustments to keep the repairs and failures at a minimum.

The bottom of this monthly IT report template for management demonstrates the financial and customer-relevant metrics such as the percentage of IT expenses, per employee, service expenses, business system use, and net promoter score. These key performance indicators show the relationship between financial performance and whether customers are satisfied with the delivered service. If any of these metrics should change in a negative way, the CTO has to investigate why because it can directly affect the business. This dashboard can also be used as a CIO report template, the point is to adjust as needed and let the BI dashboard software do the hard work.

5. Cyber Security Dashboard

Last but certainly not least in our information technology report sample list, we come to our cyber security dashboard. Considering that cyber security breaches cost the global economy trillions of dollars every year, fortifying your business from potential breaches or attacks is vital. 

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Cohesive and highly visual, this essential IT report template is armed with a wealth of metrics designed to track and monitor a multitude of breaches, as well as internal response or resolution times.

By working with this BI reporting tool regularly, you will gain a vivid view of your company’s current cyber security prevention processes while gaining a greater understanding of all potential threat sources.

If you see phishing attempts rise over time, for example, you can develop a targeted strategy to provide comprehensive staff training while fortifying touchpoints, including your customer inquiry hub or email inboxes.

This dynamic dashboard offers all you need to:

• Track and benchmark your overall cyber security rating
• Get to grips with how frequently cyber intrusions occur across the business
• Understand how consistently and swiftly you detect potential breaches across the board
• Learn how often you back up and protect sensitive company data
• Monitor, measure, and improve your phishing test success rates

This melting pot of knowledge will give you the insight you need to nip potential threats in the bud before they cause organizational devastation while optimizing every aspect of your business’s breach prevention initiatives. This is an essential IT report format in today’s hyper-connected digital age.

In the next part of the article, we will focus on best practices so you can start building reports on your own.

Best Practices In IT Reporting

To avoid drowning in data and losing focus of what really matters, you need to ask yourself these questions before embarking on your IT reporting journey:

• Who are my IT reporting efforts aimed at?
• What kind of metrics matter to my audience?
• What is the strategy behind this report: typical daily management activities or a goal-oriented, strategic assessment of the current situation (assets, resources, etc.)?

Once you’ve taken measures to understand your core departmental goals, and your general strategy, and considered your audience, you’ll be able to start creating your report. Here are the best practices to consider:

1. Select the right KPIs: When it comes to creating an effective IT management report, selecting the best key performance indicators for the job is essential. If you’ve considered your departmental goals, aims, and objectives as well as your audience, making the right choices should be relatively straightforward. A digital data dashboard that reports KPIs is interactive and visual, and by working with metrics that align with your goals, you’ll ensure you build your IT report sample on steady foundations.

2. Avoid duplication: When it comes to collecting important metrics, there is most likely a wide range of databases set up to gather information based on different aspects of your IT-based activities. A best practice is to keep everything as simple as possible and not duplicate data too much, even when an overlap seems inevitable. When the variation and volume of data increase, so does the complexity, the effort required and the general level of frustration.

3. Quality over quantity: Data quality is an essential part of reporting, particularly when it comes to IT. The outcomes of reporting are important and strategic decisions, and thus should not be based on false or failing information. Make data quality management an imperative matter of your reporting journey, and catch the data quality issues as early as possible.

4. Collaborate with the team: Collaborating with your team is essential. Working together on a report will bring out more than if only one brain was on it. Communicate your findings and see what they have analyzed and dug out from the analytics. With the help of self-service BI, it is easily feasible and several people can have access to the same source of knowledge and work.

5. Utilize templates: As you build your processes and collaborate with others, you can definitely utilize pre-built templates that will make the creation of your reports much easier and faster. There are solutions that offer many templates and you can easily pick one, adjust based on your parameters and metrics, and the dashboard is done. This will also help you become faster in your reporting process, especially if you automate and deliver the report each week or month. That brings us to our next point.

6. Automate as much as possible: Last but certainly not least, automation is becoming increasingly important in our cutthroat environment. Especially when deadlines are in question, and projects need to be delivered on time, automating as much as possible becomes critical. In that case, the whole organization can profit from having reports delivered on a special weekday or month, as we mentioned, fully automated with the established operational metrics or strategic ones.

7. Share on multiple devices: Similar to our collaboration point, sharing through multiple devices is also critical since things can go wrong in seconds and if you're not sitting at your desktop computer, the project or any IT-related task can go seriously wrong. That's why having access to your reports on multiple devices such as mobile or tablet, can help to avoid issues and enable you to immediately answer any question that might arise.

8. Stay compliant: As we migrate to an increasingly digital existence, rules and regulations around data protection are becoming more and more stringent. As a modern business, remaining compliant is critical. That’s why when it comes to IT, no departmental stone should be left unturned. By working with compliance dashboards, you will remain on the right side of the red tape at all times, preserving your organizational integrity in the process. These powerful IT reports will provide the means you need to streamline and secure your informational collection efforts in line with regulations like the GDPA and CCPA.

9. Real-time data: Another IT report best practice is working with real-time insights. In addition to using an IT department report template with historical and predictive metrics, tracking real-time or ‘in the moment information across your most vital activities is essential to remaining responsive and effective. By monitoring real-time trends and patterns, you will improve your decision-making while putting a stop to any potential issues before they snowball. Essentially, using real-time visuals to your departmental advantage will help you accurately monitor system health and keep the entire organization safe, secure, cohesive, and communicative.

10. Intelligence alerts and alarms: Setting up automated real-time data alerts will ensure you never miss an irregularity in your IT metrics (this will give you the means you need to take control of any situation, any time, and anywhere). With intelligent alerts and alarms, you can set parameters based on your specific organizational needs. For instance, you could set up a cyber breach alert that will activate when your system flags a spike in cyber attack attempts. As soon as the alarm or alert is triggered, you can get to the heart of the issue straight away while formulating strategies to improve your internal cyber breach prevention efforts.

11. Use interactive filters: To make your IT information easier to access and explore, applying interactive dashboard filters is the way forward. Working with both drill down and drill through filters will help you cut to the informational chase when necessary. Applying interactive filters will help you hone in on very specific informational pockets or info-driven trends and, ultimately, provide a more consistent service while significantly improving your strategic decision-making.

IT Reporting Mistakes To Avoid

Now that you’re up to speed with IT issues reports and dashboard analytics best practices, we’re going to explore the mistakes you should avoid at all costs. Steer clear of these common errors, and you will ensure consistent success across the board.

• Not cleaning the data

As an IT department, you will have access to an almost infinitive stream of information. But without cleaning and curating these rafts of data, it’s unlikely you will ever connect with any useful insights. To operate seamlessly and securely while managing a constant barrage of helpdesk tickets, analyzing high-quality, relevant insights is critical.

Many IT decision-makers fail to examine their informational sources while working with dashboard tools and fall into a rabbit hole of sloppy, poorly placed misinformation. To avoid wasting your resources or working with droves of data that could even harm your decision-making, you must make an effort to clean your raw information and omit all redundant insights or sources before consolidating anything into your report.

•  Not creating backups

Another common (and fairly devastating) IT analytics mistake in the modern age is overlooking the importance of creating informational backups. If you don’t back up every strand of relevant information, you could lose it. The impact of losing information or strategic information can be great, with untold departmental resources or money wasted on clawing the department's informational initiatives back to square one. With this in mind, you must make backing up your assets and any information or insights a hard-wired part of your daily duties or practices.

• Not relying on a cloud environment

Without tapping into the potential of the cloud, you will limit your potential as an IT department. Working within a cloud-based environment will ensure everyone has greater access to the essential dashboards, metrics, and insights they need at all times. Plus, your assets will remain safe, secure, and compliant.

Cloud-based environments are also more responsive, allowing you more flexibility when it comes to carrying out analytical tasks and strategic activities. Conversely, ignoring the cloud will leave your organization vulnerable while significantly stunting your service levels and overall efficiency.

• Not following IT trends

Another big mistake IT operatives make when it comes to report-based initiatives is failing to keep their finger on the pulse. If you don’t take care in following the latest analytical-style trends in your sector, you will fall behind the pack, and the business will suffer. Keeping on top of trends will empower you to move with constant change while keeping every pocket of your IT strategy primed for success.

• Narrowing your scope

While cleaning, curating, and cropping your information is 100% essential, it’s also worth noting that only working with a small cross-section of insights is a mistake. In an IT department, juggling several plates is a big part of the job. That said, if you only work with issue dashboard insights or project management insights, the department will begin to suffer (you’ll be thriving in one area and suffering in another).

But by cleaning your insights from the offset and working with a balanced mix of insights (like those covered in our five IT support report template examples), you will remain balanced, cohesive, and effective 24/7.

In the next part of the article, we will focus on real use-cases, where professionals can utilize the power of reporting IT metrics.

Real-life Applications Of Dashboards & IT Reporting

Following on from our practical IT reports examples, we’re going to explore some real-world use cases of modern dashboard reporting based on different organizational needs. While not all of these examples are directly related to IT, they serve to demonstrate the value of reporting software designed to help businesses squeeze maximum value from their most precious technical data:

a) Management: Regardless of your industry or sector, if you’re a senior member of staff, you’ll be required to communicate with other managers and executives on top-level business initiatives. That said, if you’ve identified recurrent IT issues that need fixing or are looking to develop new technology initiatives to roll out across the organization, you’ll need to clearly communicate these objectives in cross-departmental meetings. A technical report template will help you do just that—as well as adhere to management reporting best practices.

b) SaaS: If your business offers, develops, or works with software-as-a-service platforms, a dynamic SaaS dashboard (akin to IT reporting tools) will help you maximize the impact of your most valuable data, some of which can be used to enhance your technical support initiatives. SaaS businesses have the goal to establish their IT solutions on the market, increase their customers' base and loyalty, and generate profits. To be able to do so, comprehensive reporting is needed, and dashboards can help.

c) TV dashboards: By taking your technical support report template data and displaying it as a TV dashboard, you’ll be able to give everyone within the department real-time access to important information. Moreover, with TV dashboards strategically positioned throughout the organization, you’ll be able to improve transparency and give everyone within the business the information they need to do their job better.

d) Cyber security: If you’re looking at an IT department monthly report sample, one of these IT reporting tools should focus on cyber security. In the digital age, failing to fortify your business against the threat of cybercrime is like leaving your front door wide open. By consolidating your most valuable cybercrime-related metrics into one visual dashboard, you can provide a safer, swifter, and more secure helpdesk service. In-the-moment analytics will provide alerts on potential threats so you can find the source immediately and nip any potential issues in the bud. Gaining a panoramic view of your IT-based cyber prevention metrics will also empower you to improve and update your processes according to specific cyber security trends or patterns.

e) Remote working: In an age where the concept of remote working is becoming commonplace across industries, working with the right information empowers pressured IT departments with the assets to make this most integral infrastructure possible. Nowadays, professionals expect businesses to offer remote working experiences and opportunities, so getting it right is critical to attracting and retaining the right recruits. Armed with a dynamic IT service report template, it’s possible to set up practical systems and strategies for mass remote working setups as well as video conferencing, project management software, and employee chat rooms (among many other applications).

“Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming.” – Chris Lynch

The five applications mentioned above are merely the tip of the iceberg when you’re talking about the power and versatility of dynamic digital reports. Every IT report example we've covered here offers an enormous level of value to modern IT departments looking to achieve constant and consistent growth in the face of continual change.

Key Takeaways From Modern IT Reporting 

Whether you’re working with an IT department monthly report sample, a weekly sample, or any other level of report, you will boost your business performance to no end. Your IT department is the lynchpin of almost any organization. Improve the efficiency, intelligence, and responsiveness of your information technology performance, and the rest will follow.

It’s clear that to run your IT department to its optimum capacity, you need access to tools and information that far surpass basic metrics and insights alone. Interactive modern reports are the way forward. Mobile, agile, robust, customizable, and highly visual, modern technical reports will help you tackle issues with ease, improve the departmental structure, and make all-important daily, weekly, and monthly decisions with a justified sense of confidence.

Delivering valuable and uncompromised IT help to your end-users will determine the success and ongoing performance of your entire IT ecosystem. To manage every aspect with efficiency, you must work with the right tools and follow the best practices. By understanding what you need to do to create effective reports and drilling down into the wealth of features that such tools offer, you will make your IT department unstoppable, accelerating the success of the entire business in the process.

Do you want to hop aboard the analytics and reporting train and push your organization forward? Try our 14-day free trial and level up your IT department today.