Apptio

Actionable Insights

Apptio provides users with IT spending reports to help them make better and smarter decisions. However, users have hard time trying to extract values out of those reports that are actionable and cost saving. Users must learn click paths to get to detail and helpful information. This is a very time consuming process and users end up not using Apptio and this lowers renewal rate.

Now that we know simply providing users with numerous reports isn’t helping them, they would rather have cost saving insights already curated for them. We investigated how we can provide great insights in Apptio faster and increase values of their Apptio investments over time.

This project required lots of thinking and discussions in early product definition stage where scope and requirement were ambiguous. This project has been successfully launched to selected customers.

View prototype

Previous experience involved many number of clicks, delivering values of Apptio reports late.

Problem

Reports are consumed by business users who didn’t have enough time to go through training. Therefore, when they see this great number of reports, they easily get lost and ask themselves a question

“Okay. I see these reports but SO WHAT?

What should I do now?”

How we got to the problem

  • I observed how users create custom reports in Apptio to understand what they are looking for in Apptio reports. They create their own version of ‘insight report’ that to summarize actionable insights. Sometimes, customer success teams would create a collection of insights to deliver values of Apptio reports.

    • Need status of insights

      • When presented various insights, there should be a way to prioritize so that users can focus on what matters the most and come back to the rest.

    • Insights should be mapped to a specific segment such as department, cost center, or business unit to make sense.

  • As customer success team often interacts with users, I frequently checked in with the customer success team to make sure the defined problems mattered to users.

Goal

Help users immediately discover cost saving opportunities that are actionable and personalized

Solution

1. Dashboard

  • We were very intentional about how and what we present, so that we visualize essential data with actionable suggestions without overwhelming users.

  • The following dashboard shows a high level overview of potential saving areas along with supporting insights to maximize savings.

  • Each insight provides an ability for users to create an ‘Action Plan’ so that they can track how much they save vs target and benchmark.

2. All insights

While the dashboard provides a top-down view across areas with visualizations, we also wanted to provide a table view of all insights Apptio created. The table view is a familiar pattern for users, allowing them to filter, sort and search without having to learn a new interaction pattern and find what they need quickly.

We also came up with states to allow users track insights efficiently, which include:

  • Triggered - an insight gets triggered if over or under threshold

  • Active - a user acknowledged or created action plan for the insight that is triggered

  • Unacknowledged - a user hasn’t checked in on an insight yet

  • Viewing all insights

  • Active insights

  • Triggered insights

  • Insights with hierarchy

3. Insight report

  • An insight has following components; observation, impact, and recommendation. Each of the insight report allows users to dive deeper into the insight, get better understanding and create an action plan to meet the target.

  • Based on each strategy a user wants to execute, we provided a few actions - acknowledge, unsubscribe, and create action plan

  • Spend on closed projects

  • Misaligned spend ratios

  • Potential spend overage

  • Hidden vendor spend

Result

This project successfully launched in Q4’2019.

At Technology Business Management Conference 2019, where Apptio shows upcoming features to existing and future customers, this feature was announced and received excitement from current and potential customers of Apptio.

This has laid out a foundation as a personalized IT Finance dashboard experience, bringing the whole organization to take a personalized approach.

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