Automation in Service Management Systems

[scott.cresswell]

Hello,

Can anyone help me on ym question please, I would be most grateful.

'Can automation be applied to service management systems to generate classification of incidents?'

Many Thanks

[itsiders]

Hello Scott.

I like your question. The answer is depends.
When you talk about classification of incidents I think you need to be more specific. For some organizations the classification of incidents can be understood as incident status; or incident priorities; or the assignment of the incident to a group. When the service desk classify an incident there are lots of things the service desk can pick up from drop-down list so if you could be more specific to "classification" I would appreciate - different companies classify incidents differently.

There will be some situations where classification will not be possible to be automated because it depends on many variables like people roles or peoples name. Eg: for a specific incident just the role "x" can classify the incident as "z".

Any service management tool should be able to automate things but the first step would be to document exactly what you want to automate and be specific in the classification.

Hope I have helped.
Dan (www.itsiders.com)

[scott.cresswell]

Thank you very much for your reply Dan.

Basically it is a University end of year Project that I am currently challenging. Due to the scope of the project there is only a handful of incidents I will be dealing with. Having worked for Nissan Motor Manufacturing using a similar tool, classes that I came across there is what I will be using, such as;

Password Resets - Login/Email passwords
Telephone Issues - Broken Handset/Voicemail issues
Software Issues - Software Requests/Software failures
Printing Issues - Toner Repalcements/Paper Jams

These are the classes that will be looked at. If you would be able to point me in the right direction to find possible coding, or somewhere to look for further research.

Many Thanks
Scott

[guerino1]

Hi Scott,

There are two ways to automatically classify an Incident, that I know of...

1) Is to know what type of Incident it is that is coming in from an automated channel, such as from a Monitoring System or Agent. For example:

- Storage Exceeded
- CPU Slow
- IP Address Not Accessible
- Etc.

In this case, such channels auto-generate the Incidents and put them into the Incident Management Database pre-classified.

2) Is to use a Business Process Management "Rules Engine" to go through multiple attributes of the captured Incident Data and then auto-classify whatever it can. In this case, there will always be those that the Rules Engine is not set up to handle and, therefore, cannot handle. You also run the risk of incorrect classification, if the Rules are not generated properly. (As an option to Rules Engines, some people code their own rules in Scripts.)

I hope this helps.

My Best,

Frank Guerino
Chairman
The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT)