Would love to better use Model Reports to drive user interest in "infographic" style in-tool reporting. Dynamic Sankey visualization is used to great effect in TBM Studio, and in recent version of R12 the capability exists to expose Sankey views via Model Reports in Cost Transparency.

Effective use of Sankey views could encourage users who have IT or business domain knowledge, but lack familiarity with the ATUM taxonomy (and Apptio object model) to better understand how familiar concepts are related in the data model , and ask better better questions of the TBMO.

How are you and your users leveraging Model Reports?

We have a few use cases, most of which entail additional functionality (now pending consideration as RFEs):

Drill-through each line in Trace View with a double click

1. Allow users to "see" the data flowing through the lines in a Model Report by double clicking from Trace View, as is done in TBM Studio. Effectively this would expose the Source and Destination tabs that are familiar in TBM Studio without the additional allocation configuration
   • This provides basic capability, and users can export data by right clicking on the summary row.
   • Ideally this would be a configurable permission.
2. Optionally, allow existing Reports to be displayed as modal "pop over" views when the user double clicks by passing in the effective filter/context from the Sankey view. This way we could show a more appropriate view (probably recycling a view from OOB) for specific allocations.
   • Server counts and distribution by platform/cloud provider for the Servers to Applications allocation
   • Team-oriented view of resource cost flowing from Projects to Applications, etc.
   • Fall-through to basic row-level grids (see above) when no specific view is configured
   • Allow each Model Report to assign its own Report "views" for object relationships, or inherit default views that are established at the project level (perhaps leveraging some sort of OOB defaults)

Improved filtering capability

1. Allow users to select more than one "tile" in each column of a Model Report, and have the tile selection filter the data shown in the connecting lines. This could be accomplished by allowing the user to Ctrl+Click on more than one tile and also by allowing the user to specify a filter in the existing filter text box (e.g. "foo || bar"). For instance--
   • An infrastructure manager may be interested in the vendor spend for Servers and Storage
   • A business user might be interested in the combined cost of supporting several Services
2. Allow Model Reports to support non-linear click paths, so a user could select a specific low-level item (e.g. a specific server Server host name or a specific Vendor) and then select a item that is several steps removed in the model (e.g. a Service) and have the model show how they are connected with connecting lines

Better represent the ATUM taxonomy in Model Reports

1. Allow Pools and Towers to be represented similarly to full model objects. Currently they are pre-drilled columns, meaning the user has no opportunity to explore the rich column structure of the Master Data tables for Cost Source and IT Resource Towers.
   
   • Unfortunate that the key structural details of the ATUM taxonomy are hidden unless the report author creates "Tower" and "Sub Tower" columns in their report
   • Encourages users to be familiarize themselves with the Apptio object model rather than the ATUM taxonomy

Model reports were published to Cost Transparency here to support a service owner costing exercise (what you list as #1 in the drill down section, for one layer in the model).  It was good as a temporary draw because of the interactivity.  After that activity completed they were removed for the long term due to the impact on overall model calculation time and the limitations they have for reporting as compared to details available in the drills in the standard OOB service layer reports.