rmorris posted on October 02, 2008 19:34
Today was a big day! I received the final signature of one of our most ambitious projects yet! I had the privilege of working with Jefferson County, AL and installing and integrating CA's Service Desk and Clarity products. The ambitious part was dealing with the age old issue of where data should reside, especially for Help Desk individuals. Clarity is generally the system of record for timekeeping while Service Desk is the system of record for incidents. Jefferson County wanted to be able to have their help desk employees work the tickets as normal and bill time in Clarity. However, they did not want to have to bill time to every ticket or spend a tremendous amount of time trying to capture hours. They did want hours by department and then eventually all hours rolled up to each Commissioner.
We designed and delivered a custom query and portlet that would take the information contained in both systems and in real time assign the effort in Clarity to the departments that had open tickets in Service Desk. The result was a system that divided total effort in to 4 distinct buckets: Project Time, Incident Time, Support Time, and Other Time. The Commissioners received a report that would allow them to see a complete accounting of time spent in support of each district, and then could drill to see the breakout of hours, and then drill to see the items that made up each bucket of hours. In fact, they could drill further to see the actual object time was billed against and who billed the time.
A lengthy project and tremendous support from my staff at Highmark allowed us to build a solution that allows accountability and visibility into the IT Operations. i thank Jefferson County for the opportunity and look forward to continued support!