I've followed this thread with interest. Although not directly related to why categorisations should be used for assignments, there are other reasons that Op/Prod Cats should be used. - KPIs that will allow the measurement of the effectiveness & efficiency the IT services provided, the state of the infrastructure, and the processes themselves e.g. avg incident response/resolution times, assignment "bounce" - Reporting of the KPI's - And obviously, the assignment and workflow process. Ideally you're using the Op/ProdCat to support the auto-assignment in order to get the Incident to the correct place the first time, thereby reducing the need to "bounce" the incident to another queue if it is assigned incorrectly. The last thing that should be considered in the arguement is the "initial" vs "actual" Op/Prod Cat. The initial could be considered as the Op/ProdCat captured on the Classification tab However when the incident was resolved, the Op/Prod Cat on the Resolution tab captures the "actual". E.g. we initially thought the incident was caused by a network outage, but the actual cause was the user failed to turn on their PC (with appropriate Op/Prod Cats to support both). So, although not answering your specific question around Op/Prod Cats & Assignments, there are other benefits of why Op/Cats are useful to use. BTW if you haven't seen it already, take a look at thenew Incident screen on ITSM7.5 - the Op/Prod Cat fields are nowhere to be seen on the new "Best Practice" view.
________________________________ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Meyer, Jennifer L Sent: Friday, 10 April 2009 12:24 AM To: ARSList Subject: Product Categorizations and the Elephant Rhyme ** Listers, Please help me with this one. One of my management users got hold of an external source that said categorizations don't have to be used for routing. Somehow, the user misunderstood what the external source was attempting to communicate, grabbed hold of the elephant's tail, and is now trying to tell us we don't need to use Incident assignment rules based on Operational and Product Categorizations to route tickets to the correct support group. Unfortunately, we route tickets in our system based on categorizations, but this user stubbornly clings to his part of the elephant. Of course, I have Rick Cook's excellent "A New Paradigm of Generic Incident Classification," BMC's "Best Practices" documentation, and several other things I've dug up which refer obliquely to CTI (OpCats) and assignment. The problem is I ***KNOW*** CTI is used for assignment. You don't have to use it for that, but I've been using it that way since 6.X. It's so ingrained that I take it for granted that everybody else knows that, too. Does anybody have a best practices document that explicitly states that Incident assignment is based on categorization? Jennifer Meyer __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:[email protected] ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
