Control of activities in systems management

Any technological tool that supports ITSM ( IT Service Management ) must have at least the following requirements, regardless of the management process or processes that include:

1.            Self help . The different options must be clearly locatable through menus. Getting the user to generate a ticket with the appropriate characteristics and the necessary information so that it can be attended to correctly is essential. Self-help must allow the customer of the service to provide all this information in the most efficient way for the development of the life cycle of the ticket. A web page approach is usually used that are easily accessible through a very intuitive menu, always prioritizing the usability of the software.

2.            Process engine . The flows must be predefined, including a series of controls defined for the life cycle of each of them. The process engine must be able to define the responsibilities within this life cycle, the activities to be carried out, the times in which these activities must be carried out, the steps for escalation of the tickets, and the generation and management of alarms. predefined at different points in the flow.

3.            Integrated CMS . A configuration management system (Configurations Management System) that allows centralized availability of all the attributes associated with each of the elements of a service.

4.            Audit capacity . It must be able to retrieve information related to any element that is connected to the infrastructure. It is very useful if you can show the changes made since the last audit. In many cases, it can be a legal requirement, as in the case of being subject to Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. Every ticket generated in the tool must have an audit record, and associated with it must be all the information available in relation to said ticket.

5.            Remote Control . It is very useful for Service Desk resources and other support groups, so that they can access the user's computer to check the user's computer settings. The remote control must incorporate the corresponding security measures to prevent its use by unauthorized personnel or for the execution of tasks not related to the management of open tickets in the system.

6.            Diagnostic utilities . Ability to run automatic scripts that allow you to quickly identify any anomaly in the service.

7.            Reporting capacity . The stored information must be retrieved quickly and must be presented in a legible way so that it can be interpreted and decisions made based on it. The ability to monitor SLAs is especially important. The tool should facilitate their calculation and consultation. It is desirable that the tool provide interfaces that are compatible with existing reporting tools on the market, so that their integration is as simple as possible.

8.            Dashboards . It must be able to generate dashboards that allow understanding the situation of a service with a simple glance. You must provide information on the performance of the service and its availability. This information can be used to generate periodic reports to senior management, or it is also common to feed a page where the status of the service is shown with information in real time.

9.            Integration with Business Service Management . Service management as specified in ITIL focuses on the infrastructure components of the service, but is not directly related to service management from a business point of view. There are tools that do focus on the health of the business depending on the situation of the different services. In order to have a complete picture of everything that happens in relation to a service and its impact on the business, it is necessary that the ITSM and BSM tools are perfectly integrated.

10.         Notification services . Must be able to create alerts and send emails. The information sent in the e-mails must be parameterizable.

11.         Integration with other tools . It must have protocols that allow easy integration with other software, for example, through web services.

12.         Usability . The tool must be simple, intuitive and that it allows to open a new ticket with the minimum of possible windows, reducing the necessary navigation to the maximum.

Event management.

The following characteristics are essential when controlling the activities associated with the event management process:

1.            It must support the multiple service environments, and allow the generation of alerts between the different services provided by the technological infrastructure.

2.            Easy and cheap to deploy.

3.            Interfaces that allow the registration of any standard event.

4.            Ability to support new services in the design, development and testing phases.

5.            Configurable alert management based on symptoms and impact.

6.            Ability to notify managers about the existence of alerts, and escalate them in the event of not being addressed within the established time frame.

Incident Management.

The following characteristics are essential when controlling the activities associated with the incident management process:

1.            Have an integrated CMS that allows automating the relationships between incidents and the rest of the processes.

2.            The CMS should be used to prioritize issues.

3.            Defined process flows that allow defining the first actions to be carried out depending on the type of incident, such as sending SMS to the support groups involved.

4.            Ability to automatically generate and escalate alerts. In addition, it must be able to prioritize incidents based on the information associated with it (affected users, unavailable time, criticality of the service, etc.).

5.            An integrated knowledge database (KEDB) so that it can be used to search for solutions prior to the incident, or to include the solution if the incident has not occurred in the past.

6.            You must have special reporting capabilities that allow you to calculate incident metrics that will be analyzed in the problem management modules.

In incident management , to prevent tickets from breaking the agreed SLAs for a given service, it is important to have a well-established workflow and an automatic escalation procedure.

In this way, if, for example, the first support level has not been able to resolve an incident in the first 10 days, it can be directly escalated to the second level. As part of the escalation, the support groups involved have to be informed of this change in the status of the ticket .