Concerning question on Distributed Environment--short answer is : yes. By Chris' description below, our environment is characteristically different from many encountered in the commercial world, public entities, and maybe even other academic centers. We do rely on legacy knowledge in 60-odd support groups to know their local environment, so central IT folks do not have to learn an area's specific concerns 'on-the-fly'. And, summarizing description by Chris, often those group-specific items show many more peculiarities than similarities. Local experience is that central support often *fails* all consumers equally in this diverse environment, rather than facilitating prompt consumer service. We have very few applications where both installation and implementation is actually Enterprise-wide-as Chris mentioned, even backups/file-sharing/printing are more localized than centralized.
Customer-relations criteria should place the consumer first. Our support-staff folks are here for agile handling of consumer's needs; therefore, we rely on that consumer's location (logical location, specific college/school/group) for placement of Incident reports, and that is how our environment is built. Finally, we do utilize a system-wide default which will route any un-assignable Incidents to our central help desk for further handling-and to ensure that no Incident goes unhandled for lack of designation. By my last count, I have seen four (4) such incidents out of 17,000+ records over the last year. 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:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of Meyer, Jennifer L Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 2:23 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Product Categorizations and the Elephant Rhyme ** This may be an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the two approaches for organizational functions. If I understand this correctly, I and Shawn have central help desks that rely heavily on automated routing to choose from thousands of functions. Chris and Don seem to have a distributed system that relies on locally distributed service centers with a high knowledge level so uses assignment mappings as a fallback. Is this an accurate summation? Jennifer Meyer ________________________________ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of strauss Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 2:54 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Product Categorizations and the Elephant Rhyme Our system works for us since the vast majority of issues for faculty and staff are handled by their distributed computer support groups, where all of the Incidents are routed first by default. Almost all of the functions you mentioned are administered at the distributed unit level, even if they are hosted on a central service (active directory accounts and permissions, Exchange mail, disk storage), and are only escalated to the central group when the distributed group cannot handle the issue. Even backups and restores are distributed (local) - the colleges run their own file and print servers, in their own domain within the central AD system. The central helpdesk provides the equivalent first line support to all students, so that is their default routing, and a lot of the centrally supported system tickets (student email, distance learning apps, etc.) all start at the central helpdesk for triage anyway. For anything that is very specific, and is a routine request from customers supported by more than one distributed support group (like data wiring requests, which any employee can enter and all route first to DataComm, then TeleComm), there is a Kinetic Service Item that directly assigns new incidents to the appropriate central support group. BTW, the majority of desktops, especially Windows machines, are deployed for faculty/staff by their college/departmental IT staff without admin rights for the end user, with a very wide variety of software packages available to them as needed. Since this is very college or department specific (even the OS is college specific - you won't find any Macs supported in the college of business, or many Windows machines in visual arts or music), any attempt to route a ticket for application support centrally will have to be turned back. We also have a number of colleges/departments in one building, with small IT staffs, who don't use Remedy for internal ticketing at all. Their faculty know to use the Kinetic web to report a problem with the distance learning or PeopleSoft webs, which are centrally supported, but they generally email, call, or walk a few doors down to their network manager for local issue support. We don't / can't MAKE them use Remedy for internal ticketing, but as soon as any IT support organization grows to several people supporting users in multiple buildings, or even on multiple campuses, they quickly move to a model where everything gets ticketed as an incident, but it is still 98% internal to that organization. In our environment, where some groups want a few CTI for reporting but most groups don't want to have to deal with the overhead, dropping CTI-based routing made sense; we have always used location-based routing as our primary method, all the way back to Help Desk 3. The changes in the assignment processes in ITSM 7 made it easy for us to just simplify everything when we migrated, and at this point (11 months in production) we have not found any reason to regret it. Maybe if we had BMC Analytics or Dashboards we would see it differently, but we keep losing the budget battle for those. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of Pierson, Shawn Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 12:42 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Product Categorizations and the Elephant Rhyme ** I can see how this is helpful when you have staff planted in different locations that act as an extended service desk, but what about issues that require someone in the centralized I.T. group to fix? If someone has a problem with one of your enterprise-wide applications, maybe it should always be routed to a specific group. For example, if you need a restore of your shared drive from backups, most likely there is a group that handles all backup/restore requests that will address it. What about email issues, or problems with an application built in-house that requires a programmer to be involved? I can see plenty of examples where using Categorizations would be helpful for routing. I don't see how it is possible to have a template for every single scenario, especially in a situation where you are dealing with a campus full of people that probably have admin rights on their own machines and install all sorts of crazy hardware and software that is not supported by I.T. It seems like by not using categorizations you will end up with the service desk doing more of the assignment routing manually than is necessary. Shawn Pierson _Platinum Sponsor: rmisoluti...@verizon.net ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"__Platinum Sponsor: rmisoluti...@verizon.net ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor:rmisoluti...@verizon.net ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
