Fourth in a Ten Part Series
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I have often been asked about my lessons learned in implementing an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool. Below is the fourth in a ten part series examining my ITSM lessons learned. I hope that these lessons help you on your journey to ITSM nirvana.
Lesson
#4: Log Incidents, Service Requests,
Problems, Change, and Releases against Services AND Configuration Items. As I’ve mentioned in the previous lessons,
when a new service record comes into the Service Desk, you’ll want to ensure
that accurate meta-data relative to the Service and Configuration Items
impacted are accurately associated to the service record. Now, it’s not necessary that the customer correctly
identify the Service or Configuration Item, only that they submit as much
information as they have to the Service Desk.
It’s the responsibility of Service Operations to ensure that the data
ultimately appended to the service record is accurate. Without the Service and Configuration Items
being appended to the service record, it’s impossible to report on a variety of
key performance indicators (KPIs) relative to the service and / or the
configuration items. For example, if a
major incident record does not identify the service impacted, how can you
accurately report on the availability of that service? As I mentioned in point #3 above, if you make
development of the Service Catalog prerequisite to launching your ITSM
platform, logging the Service & CI impacted by the service record will be
easy. If you don’t, your ITSM platform
will simply be just another “ticketing” application.
