IT Service Management (ITSM) has become essential for running and maintaining business processes. This is largely because IT now permeates most areas of a company. In addition, parts of the service offering are often no longer handled purely in-house, but outsourced to external IT service providers. This presents challenges for both the IT department and the ITSM tool.
Background of the project
For our customer, the challenge was to implement a modular solution that could handle IT requests in a structured way and, where applicable, automatically route them to the responsible provider.
Status quo before the project
Previously, there was no central service desk, and all requests were reported to IT by email or phone. Every incoming request also had to be analyzed by an internal IT staff member and, if needed, manually forwarded to the relevant provider. This required a considerable amount of time.
What was the goal?
The goal was to present all IT services in a user-friendly way through a web portal, letting internal employees submit service requests in a targeted way through a unified web interface.
Employees submitting a service request should not need to know whether the ticket would be handled by internal IT or, where applicable, by an external service provider.
Furthermore, the status of requests was meant to be transparent and traceable for employees, with context-aware communication within a ticket also made possible.
Implementation
Since parts of 1st and 2nd level support are outsourced to various external providers, bidirectional email interfaces had to be built between the internal IT service management system and the respective external ticket systems of the providers.
Depending on the type of request, these automated interfaces either route the ticket to the responsible provider or process it within the internal service layer.
When a ticket is forwarded to an externally connected ticket system, all information entered by the requester is transmitted modularly via the interface.
Once the provider processes the ticket, an "external ticket number" is transmitted to Jira Service Management and added as a reference on the corresponding internal ticket.
Based on this reference, a clear link now exists between the internal and external ticket systems. External providers were also enabled to trigger status changes on the originating ticket via comment, without gaining actual access to the internal system. This keeps tickets in sync and up to date in both the provider's system and the originating system.
The interfaces were also designed modularly, so that another external partner can be added quickly and easily, or swapped out where needed. This flexible approach enables good scalability of the system and a sustainable solution for the customer.
Going the extra mile
During the project, it turned out that the customer already had a tool in use that reads out active computer accounts and matches them to the corresponding Windows users. To give IT staff an even better information basis per request, we decided together with the customer to bring this information into the IT service management system.
The goal was to automatically read out the relevant computer account based on the creator of a service request and link it to the ticket. As a result, the person handling a ticket now has the following additional information available, without needing to ask the requester for it directly:
- Computer name
- Computer status (active, inactive)
- Computer location
- Serial number
- Computer model
- Username
- IP address
- Computer history
- Links to all service requests that already existed or currently exist for the computer
To enrich the information in Jira, a SQL Postgres database was implemented as middleware, which regularly retrieves the data from the SQL database. This data is transferred to Jira via webhook into "Insights" objects, where it is tracked and updated regularly.
This additional implementation rounds off the customer's IT service management solution and guarantees a comprehensive, structured and sustainable way of handling all future IT requests.
Results for the customer
- Time savings
- low error rate through automated routing
- faster ticket processing times
- traceability and reporting
- centralized, transparent overview of all technical service requests
- context-aware communication within service requests
- SLA reporting for IT service providers
