At the risk of stating the obvious, we got to ask, where CTI’s “were used” in the whole process of incident, problem, change, task & asset tracking if we are to quantify its value.
1) Assignment Process: Along with location and skills information, categorizations decided where incoming tickets would be queued at. 2) Escalation (SLA/SLM) Process: CTI’s could be used for special escalation of specific type of tickets. 3) Reports: CTI’s help with statistical analysis, trends, searches, determining ticket relationships, etc. which help management with the data required to make key business decisions that drive the decisions of allocation or resources both material as well as people. I would think that the 3rd reason I’ve described above should justify the need for using CTI’s even if the application for its internal processing moves away from it – and hopefully does not totally deprecate it. In my opinion, an ITSM tool or any other generic tracking tool would loose a good deal of its flavor if it does not have a reasonable categorization feature for its records. So even if somehow processes like Assignment, Escalation use other attributes in the data, CTI’s still would help for human readability and classification of data for the purpose of data retrieval during reporting, analysis or a search. My 2 cents. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jason Miller Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 8:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: OT: Is CTI still relevant? (was "Categorization") ** I thought I would branch off this categorization thread since it is pretty timely to my organization. We are just starting requirement gathering to build our own Help Desk app that will replace the HD v6 one we use right now. Our IT org is very wrapped up in CTIs. Over the years I have been involved in many passionate CTI conversations. And of course there is always the request to add a 4th level (remember we are on HD 6 without Op/Prod cats being separate). There is currently a workgroup that meets weekly to clean up and standardize CTIs. What I wondering is are CTIs still relevant and useful today? Maybe they are? But I want to explore the possibility they are not, and think outside of the CTI box while we build our new Help Desk application. A little context/history: We built our own custom Change Management app in 2014. As we were doing mockup of the main form I instinctively added CTI along with a separate Product field (giving use that sought after 4th level) and Activity. The Activity field was a customization to ITSM 8.x that "characterized the change" and lead the submitter to use the right Change Template. As we refined the new form we ended up ditching Category and Item and repurposed Type into Change Type (Routine, Medium, Complex). Between Product and Activity we found we did not need any further categorization (granted this app has only been in production 4 months, let's build a year's worth of data and see if we need it for reporting later). As we are kicking around design considerations for our new Help Desk app I am wondering if we still need CTIs? Admittedly our CTIs in Help Desk have considerable automation based on them (priority, paging, routing, special notifications, etc.) where we didn't need all this for CM. I am asking: 1) on a conceptual level what do you all think about the "need" for CTI (or categorization). 2) are there any custom shops out there that have either ditched CTI and/or have come up with some other methodology? If you are interested here is a screenshot of the top left portion of our CM form with the Product (we branched in to services too, total non ITIL shop), Activity (menu based on Support Group, set by the Product) and the Change Type. Thanks for your feedback! Jason On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Thad Esser <[email protected]> wrote: ** Scott, Rick's document is absolutely a good starting point - it has helped me. Over the years, another way I've used to describe categorizations is: * The OpCat is the "verb" of the ticket. What action is being taken because of this ticket. I ask, "Operationally, how do we handle this ticket?" For example, "Add->Server->xxx". * The ProdCat is the "noun" of the ticket. What is the thing this ticket is about? (Hardware>Processing Unit>Server) For the OpCats, if you use things like Add, Fix, Remove, or Change in the OpCat Tier 1, try to keep the Tier 2 homogeneous. So for example, "Add->Server", "Fix->Server", "Change->Server". You don't want to end up with "Add->Software" and "Change->Application". That's not a hard-n-fast rule, but worth thinking about along the way. Hope that helps, Thad On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 6:03 AM, Scott Hallenger <[email protected]> wrote: ** Not sure if this is asking for too much, or that I'm crossing the lines of info sharing etiquette wit this question, but here it goes. I have been Working on re-working my clients current Product and Op category matrix,which is in bad shape. If was wondering if anyone would be willing to share their category matrix just so that I would have something to start with. This way I am not re-inventing the wheel. I figured someone out there my actually have a Cat matrix that they are happy with. If you not comfortable with sharing I understand. My client is a retail organization if that helps. _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
