Today we’re announcing some of the deepest data available in any SaaS Management Platform: Insights down to the individual user as well as teams in your organization. From the beginning we’ve held the belief that SaaS Management is so much more than just knowing your license count: it’s about unlocking productivity for every one of your employees. But how can you do that if you don’t have insight on each of them?
Even if an IT administrator is using a typical SaaS Management tool, it would be difficult to derive more detailed information than at an application level. But what if your goal is to partner with Sales for example, and help them make sure they are getting the most out of their applications? What if you want to see how you can help Engineering by offloading vendor management from them? And what if you wanted to see individuals across the organization that are adopting a key application at a lower rate than everyone else, so you can reach out to help?
In order to truly unlock the potential hidden in each application, for each employee, you need the visibility to understand and measure what they are using and how it impacts those around them. That’s what our team and user insights are all about. Once you have these insights supporting you, solving any issue “beyond the app” where you need to dig down into team or individual data becomes much more manageable.
Finally, as we’ll talk about near the end, this type of data breakdown is going to help us build many more features in the weeks and months ahead. In other words, we’re just getting started. Enough about that, let’s show you what we’ve just released.
Team Insights
As we’ve become the default SaaS Management tool for many organizations, the questions our users ask have become deeper and more complex. One of the most relevant is, “OK you’ve shown me all the apps for my company, but how does that relate to the engineering department? Marketing? Sales?”
The value of this data is clear, and high: By understanding how a team, a function, or a business unit is using apps, you can understand what’s working and being adopted, and what’s not. That allows you to decide:
- Where can I run adoption programs to better drive productivity?
- What applications should we consider deprovisioning or cancelling?
- If we know a particular team is doing very well, what can we learn from their application usage to bring knowledge to others in the organization?
This where team insights come into play.
With team insights, you can get a complete understanding of how your applications relate to teams in your organization. A team is loosely defined as any segment of people that you naturally group together. We pull this information from your HR system (for example, Workday), and keep it up to date. If you don’t use a system such as this, you can also upload a CSV with the relevant structured information and we’re good to go! Let’s take a look at a sample organization.
We’ll start with their breakout by team, and see how many applications they are running:
We see a powerful visual that instantly relates team size to the number of applications they are using. In this case, we see Engineering (our largest team, with over 2K employees), uses 130 applications.
By clicking on the engineering team, we now get to the good stuff. We see a breakdown of the team size, apps, as well as their provisioned spend versus the last 12 months.
Now, at a glance, we actually see all the applications we’ve provisioned for engineering, in addition to how many of those users are active within the app.
You can further segment this information by location, or even create custom segments to analyze your employee data in a way that better suits you. Flexibility is key – if you want to see spend by Level III Distinguished Engineers located in Phoenix, we want to make that happen.
This allows you to get the specific view you need to support your team. Whether it’s making sure part of a group is well supported, or providing detailed expense information back to FP&A, Productiv makes it easy to get beyond thinking of an “app” and into constructs that actually represent your business, like a team.
If you’re following the screenshots closely, you might have noticed that spend in the last 12 months for the engineering team far exceeds provisioned spend. Let’s find out what that’s about.
Just scrolling down the page a little further, we can actually see all the line-item spend for engineering that wasn’t contracted and paid for by IT. By processing your expense system data, we can automatically pull out SaaS spend by individual as they are requesting reimbursement, and then aggregate that into a view of the team spend as a whole.
Here we have, among other expenses, over a million dollars in cloud computing spend being expensed. That’s a lot of frequent flyer points on someone’s credit card! More importantly, it feels like there is a good chance that IT could negotiate a much better deal, while also removing some overhead for engineering. Opportunity calls!
User Insights
OK, so now we’ve seen something you’ve likely never seen before: real-time data on activity and spend per application for a given team in your company, even split out to a location or other special segment. What could be better?
Well, probably nothing. But let’s look at something even deeper: some of those same insights down to the individual user.
Here is a small slice of our 2300+ engineering users, and we can see by identifier (email, in our sample environment) apps and their spend. Very powerful, but what happens when you click on a user ID? You probably know the answer, but let’s look at it just to confirm:
Now we see this individual user’s applications, engagement per application, the type of license she has, and the spend that has been provisioned for her against that application. If we need to help this person in some way, we have the deep data we need to quickly assess the challenge and isolate the most important applications or spend items that we should focus on.
That’s proactive IT. But do you want to get more proactive?
With this level of information, you can also be a consultative partner to managers, teams, and the business at large. For example, if you know there is a set of high performers in the organization, what does their application stack look like? Where are they most engaged? You could flip this conversation around and look for those who aren’t high performers, and understand if they are stuck in tools where you can help through training or even replacement of the tools.
Users and Teams: Pervasive concepts in Productiv
It’s important to note that the concepts of Users and Teams are not isolated to a particular section of Productiv. They are fundamental concepts that are expressed continuously through the application.
Do you want to break down a particular application’s engagement by teams? We absolutely provide that. Do you want to compare application overlap within a team? Yes, it’s there.
And of course, we plan to continue to leverage this capability as we bring new datasets, engagement analyzers, and use cases into the product. This will allow you to become more data-driven, more strategic, and more proactive as you help your organization unlock the productivity hidden within your applications.