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By Ron Hill, Principal Solution Consultant, Cloudaction    

I am big fan of a service-oriented service management implementation. And you’re no doubt thinking, so what does service-oriented service management implementation mean? A service-oriented service management implementation is when all decisions regarding support and changes take into account the service affected and the value that each service has to the customer/business. It also means that your service management application configurations should exist to support your services.

One great example of this is assigning urgency, or the measure of business criticality of an incident, problem, or change. And let’s focus on incident in our example. The ITIL framework recommends that priorities of incidents are driven from a matrix of impact and urgency. The urgency is related to the timeliness that an incident should be resolved. Impact relates to the extent to which the performance or the functionality of a service is degraded. Most IT service applications allow for the urgency to be selected when registering the record. By doing this, it allows the staff member registering the record to choose the urgency based upon his or her current emotion and judgment. The central issue is whether that takes into account the importance of the service that is affected. The result is too often an inconsistent priority assignment to your incidents. Additionally, this is one more thing that the support staff have to populate and evaluate when registering an incident.

I propose a simple solution to address this common inconsistency, which will also increase the efficiency of your staff. When defining your service catalog, simply evaluate and define the business importance level (BIL) that the service has to the customer. Once you have assigned the urgency (based upon the BIL) to the service, you can then be used to populate that value on the incident record. This can be achieved with various automation mechanisms in your application. In Remedyforce this is a simple Salesforce flow definition.

The value of the urgency is important, too. The typical values for urgency are high, medium, and low. My feeling is that this is somewhat arbitrary. At least, however, it is a relative scale, but I think that we can improve upon that. I would suggest that we speak in terms that the business would better understand. Values that I use as a starting point with customer are core, critical, important and useful. (Note that we are not limited to three selections.) In practice, you can use whatever language you feel is most meaningful to your organization, but the point is that you should speak to the value of the service to the customer in business terms.

If you would like to learn more about how you can implement a service-oriented service management mindset in your organization, please contact Cloudaction and one of our consultants can assist you. At Cloudaction, our goal is to help you get maximum value from Remedyforce. We welcome your comments and suggestions. Please reach out to our team via Ask Us NOW!, a complimentary service from Cloudaction to provide answers to your product capability, functionality, and implementation questions. We promise to respond to your inquiry or question within 24 hours.