I'll confirm Chuck's observation for ITSM 7.0.3; we took our implementation one step further:
We purposefully constructed all Ownership and Assignment rules to be mutually exclusive; that is, a particular combination of entries for items 2 through 17 as listed by J. T. may be matched by one-and only one!-rule for each of Assignment, and Ownership. Such full specification eliminates the need to rely on estimation of which matching rule will be utilized-because only one such rule will match, period. In particular-that means if one contact entity requests particular treatment for an operational or product combination, rules must be built for ALL OTHER possible operational and/or product combinations which utilize that same contact! Also, if one company requests particular treatment for one department, then other rules must be built for each other department within that same company. More permutations can be observed on location. Configurators need to be aware--this is an exercise in naïve set theory, which is potentially extensive and tedious-and can run afoul of de Morgan's laws on unions, intersections, and complements thereof very easily!! Our implementation includes 239 potential customer contact points, and 60-odd product specifications beyond DSL, at last count. Fortunately, most of our customer contact groups do not specify product or operational criteria, which simplifies the combinations considerably. This paradigm is very configurable-but with a lot of room for ambiguity and confusion. Don W. McClure, P.E. Applications Manager, Call Tracking Administration University of North Texas dwmac (at) unt (dot) edu From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charles Baldi Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 10:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Incident Owner - ITSM 7.0.3 p8 ** To your first question, your observation is correct. The order of Owner assignment appears to be: 1. If user has entered a value for Owner, use it 2. If there is an Owner rule in CFG:Assignment, use it 3. Use default Owner rules based on submitter, assigned group, etc. To your second point, I have not had trouble getting rules to work based on Operational or Product categories, with one exception. If you have multiple rules that have the same Tier 1 value and one has NULL for Tier 2 while the other is non-NULL, there seems to be ambiguity as to which one is located. I would have expected the most-specific value to fire but we did not see that. We fixed it by ensuring that all rules used the same tiers populated. You may be able to address this with sort order. We did not observe that sort order overrode all the other values. If true, I would think it is a bug. Regards, Chuck Baldi On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 11:25 AM, J.T. Shyman <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: ** I've got a question about Incident Owner assignment in ITSM 7.0.3. I've done some testing and read through the documentation and postings about this on ARSList but I have reached two conclusions that I wanted to get some feedback on from the list membership. First, the Incident Owner assignment does work exactly as stated on pages 125-126 of the Incident Management 7.0 User Guide but only if there isn't a Incident Owner entry for the company in the CFG:Assignment form. This tells me that CFG:Assignment overrides the OTB Incident Management Incident Owner assignment. Has anyone else found this to be true or disagree with this? Second, if there are multiple Incident Owner entries for a given company in CFG:Assignment they are not selected by the most specific rule but rather by a long "order by" statement that looks like this: ORDER BY 2 DESC,3 ASC,4 DESC,5 ASC,6 ASC,7 DESC,8 ASC,9 ASC,10 ASC,11 ASC,12 ASC,13 ASC,14 ASC,15 ASC,16 ASC,17 ASC, 1 ASC Where 2 is Event 3 is Sort Order 4 is Contact Company 5 is Organization 6 is Department 7 is Location Company 8 is Region 9 is Site Group 10 is Site+ 11 is Operational Tier 1 12 is Operational Tier 2 13 is Operational Tier 3 14 is Product Tier 1 15 is Product Tier 2 16 is Product Tier 3 17 is Product Name 1 is Request ID (Record Number) This, plus the fact that the filter matches most of these fields to a value or to NULL leads the to the net effect that the record with the lowest sort order will always be chosen regardless of the fields other than Contact Company and Location Company. Has anyone else found this to be true or disagree with this? If I wanted to set up a set of Incident Owner assignments that would fire on different product and operational categorizations, what would be the best way to do it? --- J.T. Shyman __Platinum Sponsor: RMI Solutions ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" html___ __Platinum Sponsor: RMI Solutions ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" html___ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor: RMI Solutions ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
