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, Filed Under: Newsletter

September 2023

ITS Service Management Newsletter

September 2023

  • Helpful Hints
  • Announcements
  • Service Management Project Updates

UT Tower in the fall: University Communications

Helpful Hints

Reporting Service Outages / Degradations

When an incident has been identified with an ITS Service, it is vital the university community is kept informed of the current state of the ITS Service and the estimated time to restore it to the expected behavior. Communication requirements will depend on both the incident priority and the business criticality of the affected Service.

Remember to always use the ITS Incident Management Communication template when communicating service outages or degradations with ITS Services to campus. The template should be used for communications via ITS Problems and specific customer distribution lists. Service Owners are also encouraged to use the template to create custom Outlook templates for their services so they can get notifications out quicker. Additional guidance and templates can be found on the ITS Organizational Communications wiki.

Once the Service Owner verifies an active incident exists that is affecting the customer experience (e.g., outage or degradation),

  • if the incident is classified as Routine (not Major), communication with the affected user population is required using the service’s established means of notifying them (e.g., emailing ITS Problems or a specific customer distribution list, posting to the !Service Outages! channel of the UT IT Community Teams room or other specific customer Teams or Slack channel)
  • if the Incident is classified as Major, leadership should be engaged and communication initiated following the table Major Incident Checklist, in addition to notifying the affected user population using established communication channels.

For additional information on classifying an incident, please refer to the ITS Incident Management Standards and Guidelines.

Use Permalinks for ServiceNow Knowledge Base Articles

When linking to ServiceNow Knowledge Base articles (KB), it is important to utilize the “Copy Permalink” link in the KB to ensure that the link will always direct the user to the most recent published version. If the URL of the KB article is used instead, a user clicking on the link will be directed to a possibly deprecated version of the KB that was active at the time the link was created.

Announcements

The ITS Metrics Dashboard project, led by Terry Gibson, is complete!

ITS supports 120+ service offerings to our campus of 70,000+ faculty, staff, and students to support the university’s mission of education, research, and public service. The ITS metrics dashboard provides a one stop view of ITS ServiceNow tickets for the last 12 months for incidents, requests, and changes. Future metrics will include major incidents and problems.

New CIs added to ServiceNow

In collaboration with several CSU desktop IT support groups on campus, 12 new Service Offering CI’s have been added in ServiceNow to enable them to gather better metrics for reporting. Although these new CI’s will not display in the service catalog, they are available to be added to a ticket as an ‘affected CI.’ Thank you to Margie Athol, Information Technology Manager from the College of Natural Sciences, for championing this collaboration!

“The door for collaboration is blown open when a crowd-sourced CMDB of Service Offerings highlights areas of common ground among our federated IT community so we can create solutions together, while maintaining the ability to validate and illustrate our key differences. With the opportunity to request specific CIs comes the ability for CNS IT to directly apply the same schema for measuring progress developed by CNS leadership based on the priorities of the college and be an agile service point adapting in real time to offer tailored solutions for our science-oriented community.”

Service Management Project Updates

ITSM Roadmap
  • ServiceNow Major Incident Process: In Progress
    • MIM functional testing and configuration continues
    • Twillio implementation in progress
  • Service Catalog and Request Management Phase 2: In Progress
    • Currently building ‘Service’, ‘Service Offering’, and ‘Request Item’ templates, documentation, and service onboarding form for review by the project team and ServiceNow.
    • Project Manager: Gary Ward
    • Target completion October 2023
  • Knowledge Management Enhancements: In Progress
    • Focus on identifying enhancements to knowledge management in ServiceNow that can be unlocked and implemented in current or future product releases (e.g. Converting knowledge notifications to incidents). CSS will continue developing knowledge dashboards and best practices to share in collaboration with other departments interested in knowledge onboarding.
      • Project Manager: Gary Ward
      • Target Completion Spring 2024
  • ServiceNow Walk-up Experience: In Progress
    • In partnership with InSource, this project will launch the Walk-Up Experience, which will create a smoother customer experience, improve our metrics collection and allow appointments to be set and maintained in ServiceNow.
    • Lead: Jessi Tuomala
    • Target Completion October 2023
  • CMDB Phase 1 Implementation: On Hold
  • ITS Performance Analytics: On Hold
    • Will provide the CSS Service Delivery team with enhanced ServiceNow reporting capabilities to reduce the time it takes to produce quality metrics and reports
    • Streamlining SOW with InSource and will be resubmitted for ITT budget approval when ready
    • Lead: Liz Litsinger
    • Target completion Dec 2023

Please submit your questions or comments for the Service Management Team

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