Solution Manager Demystified Part 3: IT Service Management (ITSM)

We put together a number of Executive Summaries and Work Samples in an effort to demystify Solution Manager functionality and to illustrate its benefits beyond Basis. The third part is on IT Service Management (ITSM) and as always, feel free to read all our summaries and samples by clicking here. For additional context you may also want to read my SolMan article. I hope you will find this helpful.

IT Service Management (ITSM)

IT Service Management (ITSM) is an application within Solution Manager (SolMan) which is used to capture, track, assign and build a repository of resolutions for frequently problems, which then can be searched by end-users. ITSM is used to capture incidents, problems, Change requests for IT software and hardware assets.

The benefits of ITSM

1. Service Level Management has the flexibility for auto-escalation within companies, departments or teams based on predefined configurable rules.
2. Management dashboards, queries and report can be utilized for measuring efficiency, backlogs and performance by service technicians
3. Knowledge Management repository can be utilized by service technicians as well as key end-users for solving their incidents quicker or self-help
4. ITSM can be outsourced to third party support vendors for reducing the call-center overhead costs
5. ITSM is Information Technology Infrastructure Library(ITIL) ISO/ICE 20000 compliant
6. ITSM can be leveraged by the other SolMan applications such as: Alert Monitoring to automatically generate an incident report when an alert threshold has been exceeded. For example, when ABAP dumps exceed 5 in an hour,
7. Problem reported can be forwarded to Root Cause Analysis application for deeper dive resolution techniques
8. Request for software (SAP or non-SAP) changes can be managed through Change Request Management (ChaRM) from development through testing and finally into production.
9. Problems specific to SAP Software which cannot be resolved by internal staff can be forwarded to SAP Online Support Services (OSS) for resolution.
10. Defects detected in the Test Management workbench will generate Incident tickets which in turn trigger change request for development fixes. These fixes will be managed through ChaRM documents

Work Sample

We implemented a ITSM solution which allowed our manufacturing client who just went live with SAP ECC, BW, CRM and Portal. They wanted a solution which allowed them to utilize their existing Service Desk vendor, Legacy Help Desk Software (LHS) and the new Center of Excellence (CoE). We built the solution which aligned the criteria for assigning Incident severity, priority, service level agreement (SLA) assignment and escalation rules. We created the workflow rules to assign to the appropriate group for resolution. We designed the interface which routed the Incident tickets and all updates to the LHS as it was to be system of record. ITSM queries were used heavily by management to staff the CoE with the skilled resources required. The Knowledge Management repository populated by all the incidents and resolutions was made available to be search by the subject matter expert end-users for self-service.