Chris, Are you keying off the Site field to figure out which Tier 1 support group takes the incident?
Jennifer Meyer ________________________________ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of strauss Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 6:37 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Product Categorizations and the Elephant Rhyme If that is all that there is to the Service Catalog, then BMC has been blowing a lot of smoke about it in my opinion. Our CFG:ServiceCatalogAssoc contains the 53 Global CTI that our helpdesk defined before we went live and Don imported with Data Management, plus a few I added to support campus-wide outage reporting. We have another 154 non-Third Party Product CTI that we also imported or defined in four major categories: Computing Services, Desktop Software, Hardware, and Infrastructure. Don built all of this in consultation with the central helpdesk, who incorporated many of these CTI into their Incident templates. We gave every one of the colleges and departments, who each have their own Company, the ability to define their own CTIs within their company, but so far NO ONE has done so in almost a year of production. To me, a Service Catalog entry should exist at a hierarchical level above CTI, as was hinted at but not realized in ITSM 5.x, but I have never found that implemented in the ITSM apps in a practical way. The closest is the Business Service configuration item in Asset Management/CMDB, but like everything in the CMDB it is a Product categorization, not an Operational categorization. There does not appear to be any place that you can tie OpCats and ProdCats together under a defined IT Service at what I have always perceived to be the "Service Catalog" level. Whenever I have heard people talk about a "Service Catalog," I was looking for something where you can define an IT Service like "Payroll Services" and it will have some OpCats for Incidents and Changes to use, and some ProdCats that define the system CIs and component CIs that make up the IT Service. Without the top-level connection, it's the same huge pile of incomprehensible categorizations that we cussed and discussed for the last decade, and finally discarded. I think we actually got the closest to this in our old 5.x app when we added a second tier to the Summaries in the Requester Console, and the top tier included things like "Student Computing Services," "Distributed Computing Services," and "Administrative Computing Services" as well as more specific things like "Residence Networks." Even the helpdesk staff MUCH preferred to use the Summary menus (which carried over into Help Desk cases just like they did in the Requester -New Request form) to quickly categorize a ticket than to wade through the CTI menus, even after we gave them a pull-right hierarchical menu of the CTIs to navigate. Today they have learned to use the 40 some odd incident templates defined by their manager in almost the same way. Looking back, I don't see very many support staff on our ITSM 7 system making use of even the existing categorizations. I reviewed ~16,200 incidents from the last 11 months and the vast majority of those with populated categorizations (6,676) were either generated by Kinetic Request, or by the central helpdesk which uses incident templates wherever possible. The rest had no CTI whatsoever. Once ITSM 7 made it optional data, and without any emphasis from IT managers in most of our support groups to enter it for reporting, CTI usage plummeted. Something to think about if we ever want to do really detailed reporting. On the other hand, we have heard many comments over the last year that the support staff users like this version better than previous ones since they can get tickets into it quicker, so we gained in speed what we lost in detail. Your mileage _will_ vary! 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 Meyer, Jennifer L Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 12:53 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Product Categorizations and the Elephant Rhyme ** Thank you, Chris, Rick, and Don for your feedback. Chris, Thank you for a very well-reasoned argument. I always value your input highly. As you said, there are a number of different ways to configure assignment in Remedy 7.X, and keying on CTI may not be the best method to use for every organization. Personally, I'd rather thoroughly train the first-level help desk in the business process and allow them to make intelligent decisions, but if that happened in the real world, we wouldn't need assignment rules. The assignment method was decided long before I joined the organization, and I'm not in a position to change it; however, neither is MET (Thanks, Rick!). The last time I had Remedy training was 6.0, (2005) so I'm learning 7.X on the job. We support a very large company with multi-tenancy from a central hub, so keying off organization won't work for us. In our case, generic OpCats and ProdCats work quite well. We also use assignment rules tied to every support group. Thank you again for your excellent response. I learned quite a bit reading it. P.S. Service Catalog is defined in CFG:ServiceCatalogAssoc. We import it from the 25+ page Foundation Data Spreadsheet. Don, You put a lot of detail into your explanation; the set theory model was an apt method to describe it. We create mutually exclusive assignment records. I've learned through filter logging that if any support group does not have an assignment rule, some of the OOB workflow fails. We also have a SPOC (Tier 1 Help Desk) for each tenancy, so all incidents are owned by that tenancy's SPOC and assigned to Tier 2 support by SPOC personnel. As I mentioned above, if Tier 1 were trained as well as we'd all like assignment rules would be redundant. Rick, I'm a huge fan of your "Generic Incident Classification" document, as you already know. I keep a copy on a flash drive that's on me at all times, and it's come in very useful. The chief issue with MET is that he's an individual (actually, two individuals) with whom we have a very cordial working relationship, and we'd prefer to keep him on our side. Also, as happens too often in organizations, process definition and enforcement in management is somewhat lax. I'm convinced this is a communication issue that we can overcome by showing MET more of the elephant. I strongly suspect MET got wind of an argument similar to the one Chris first made, interpreted it incorrectly, and doesn't have a strong enough grasp of the assignment process to follow it through to its conclusion. Chris's argument is really solid, but it's not the assignment process we're using. Thank you, gentlemen, for putting so much thought and concern into your responses. If you folks should happen to come across anything indicating Categorizations are a solid method for assignment, please do send it my way. Even if it's from '95 to '02, and has the Remedy or P-word logo on it, at least it looks official. Jennifer Meyer Remedy Technical Support Specialist State of North Carolina Office Of Information Technology Services Service Delivery Division ITSM & ITAM Services Office: 919-754-6543 ITS Service Desk: 919-754-6000 jennifer.me...@its.nc.gov<mailto:jennifer.me...@its.nc.gov> http://its.state.nc.us E-mail correspondence to and from this address may be subject to the North Carolina Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties only by an authorized State Official. __Platinum Sponsor: RMI Solutions ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" html____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"
