It's hard to use a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to provide information for incident resolution, root cause problem analysis, and change planning if the information in it is out of date. But a fully populated, up to date CMDB can help close incidents faster, lead to more successful changes, improve your software license compliance, reduce your security risks, and help optimize purchasing of IT hardware and software assets.

iET Solutions now offers iET CMDB Discovery and iET CMDB Intelligence, which work together to discover your infrastructure, provide a full inventory of the desktops, servers, printers, switches, and other networked devices present, and publish the information to your CMDB-while highlighting unauthorized changes. And all of this is done without additional client side software agents. iET CMDB Intelligence is even smart enough to accept input from multiple discovery and asset management tools and reconcile them into one definitive view of your infrastructure. Now that's intelligent.

This is the year for Configuration and Change Management at iET Solutions. In addition to the solutions discussed above, upcoming product releases will include a graphic visualization of the CMDB, plus a fully featured Release Management module that provides support for complex, multi-product, multi-step releases and integrates with your existing change and configuration management processes.

For more information about configuration management solutions from iET, please contact Third Sky or see us on the web at www.iet-solutions.com

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Business Issue:

iET ITSM Escalation Configuration may result in "redundant" paging. Recipients of too many pages or e-mails complain and are desensitized to escalations over time.

Symptoms:

"Redundant" escalation can take multiple forms:

1. A single person receives multiple escalations for a single milestone on an incident. For example, an incident has not been closed within an hour, and the manager receives two pages for this non-closure milestone.
2. A single person receives escalations for multiple milestones at the same time. For example, an incident has not been closed and the owner rep suddenly receives 3 pages, one for the 50% non-closure notification, one for the 75% notification, and one escalation.

Out-of-the-box, the ITSM product allows configuration of 2 notifications, which are typically used to alert someone that the escalation milestone is approaching, and an escalation, typically used to alert a manager or team lead that a milestone has been missed. Companies often add custom rules to notify certain people when an incident has not been completed, has not been updated, has not been assigned, or various other reasons. A combination of business and technical reasons may lead to "redundant" escalations:

1. Over-reliance on escalations. The iET escalation functionality is robust and can be overused. It is not unusual for a company to send notifications and escalations on a schedule that sends out pages and emails far more quickly than it is realistic for recipients to handle. A company might also send out notifications and escalations for milestones such as "No Diary Entry Added in 2 Hours", which the owner receives every 2 hours if no diary entry is added to an incident.
2. Single person, multiple roles. For example, the incident owner may also be a manager. If the incident has passed a non-closure milestone, the incident owner and the manager should be paged, but in this case they are one, so this one person gets two pages for the same trigger.
3. Reprioritization. For example, a low-priority incident (target closure 48 hours) is changed to a high-priority incident (target closure 2 hours), but it was logged 6 hours ago. When the priority changes, all of the high-priority targets have already been missed, causing any escalations associated with those targets to fire all at once.
4. Difference in incident "log time" vs. "save time". iET ITSM starts the SLA clock ticket when the "New Incident" button is pressed-not when the user presses "Save" on that incident. Users who open a New Incident form but do not log an incident in it for hours may find that all of the escalations fire as soon as the incident is saved.

1. Reduce paging overall. Consider whether a single notification for any incident might be just as effective as 3, particularly when the multiple notifications are going to the same person for any reason.
2. Establish close ties between desired behavior and escalation rules. The desired behavior may or may not be driven by SLAs, but should always be driven by the end goal-incident closure. Escalation for progress (e.g forcing diary entry every 2 hours) incents reps to enter diary entries (if for no other reason but to avoid receiving a page) but does little to drive the incident to closure, and hence adds less value for your customers, and may not be necessary at all.
3. Use iET workflow to eliminate multi-role redundancy. For example, on any escalation form, use workflow to check if the owner rep is the same as the transfer rep, and only send the escalation to the owner rep in this case.
4. Use iET escalation groups to eliminate multiple pages firing at the same time for different milestones (happens in the reprioritization and "log/save time" examples). When selecting milestones against which escalation should occur, only retrieve the most recent milestone. For example, if you reprioritized a low-priority incident to high priority and all 3 of the notification/escalation milestones have already been passed, ignore the notifications and select only the escalation milestone by using the appropriate constraints on your SQL statement in the Escalation Group.

Complexities in escalation rules are frequently overlooked until the pain is felt, and either they do not have the desired effect, do not incent the desired behavior, or simply create annoyances for the recipients. Take into account and seek to avoid some of the causes for redundancy when putting together an escalation design-but don't forget that what some recipients will consider "redundant" is actually driving the business process forward. "Begin with the end in mind" and you are on your way to escalation success.

Thanks to Dustin Davis, Director - Dallas Office, for this tip. Need expert advice on how to configure and customize ITSM? Contact sales@thirdsky.com and ask about our Pay-As-You-Go Consulting Support Service.

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