I love the post below so much I can't quite describe it. Categorization has bothered me for years - since 1994, when I encountered my first help desk product (anyone remember Software Artistry?)
Anyway, the problem is always that - at some level - you end up with repeating terms. Breaking CTI up and to Prod/Op Cats kind of works, but also adds a layer of confusion for lots of people. So why not tags? It's brilliant, and simple. You could have a pre-defined list of them as well with alias. For example, "Desktop" and "workstation" are basically the same thing to most people (you Unix guys, don't start...). William Rentfrow [email protected] Office: 715-204-3061 or 701-232-5697x25 Cell: 715-498-5056 From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thad Esser Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 11:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT: Is CTI still relevant? (was "Categorization") ** Jason, I've mulled over the same questions - what is the best way to categorize a ticket to achieve routing and reporting? I think one of the inherent issues with CTI (and/or Op/Prod cats), is the hierarchical structure of them. It's not always clear what values should be at what tier and frequently there is ambiguity in which word/tier is a subset of another. One thought I've had is to ditch the hierarchy, and just have one big text field that holds "Tags" for categorization, similar to the way many forum sites (stackoverflow for example) categorize their conversations. You'd be able to slice the records however you wanted for reporting, without forcing tiers. You could add as many tags as reasonably needed. In my fantasy, AI enthusiast world, it'd be cool to have the Tags automatically created based on the relevant (tricky to define) words in the Summary field or other aspects of the tickets. For routing, the assignment config form would have several generic fields that get wild carded and AND-ed together against the single CategorizationTags field. The config form would basically stay the same as it is in ITSM, except instead of comparing field-to-field, all the assignment criteria fields would be compared against the one CategorizationTags field. Transition would consist of populating the CategorizationTags field on each record with the values in CTI fields. I've never had a chance to build this out, so there may be hidden gotchas, but it is fun to consider. I can see performance of the wildcard searching as one possible issue. Anyway, some food for thought. Thad On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 5:26 PM, Jason Miller <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: ** 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. [cid:[email protected]] Thanks for your feedback! Jason On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Thad Esser <[email protected]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ ________________________________ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com<http://www.avg.com> Version: 2014.0.4800 / Virus Database: 4257/9025 - Release Date: 01/30/15 _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
