Comply or Not Comply
–Workflow–
Ability to support automatic assignment of a record by:
- Categorization/Type
- Status
- Severity, SLA and/or Priority
- Date and Time (Calendar Routing)
- Agent/Analyst Skills
Ability to support automatic escalation of a record by:
- Categorization/Type
- Status
- Severity, SLA and/or Priority
- Date and Time (Calendar Routing)
- Agent/Analyst Skills
Ability to support automated escalation capabilities, such as
automatic end-of-shift routing
Ability to support both functional and hierarchical
escalation
Ability to edit and display workflows graphically
Ability for tasks to be assigned and managed sequentially or
in parallel
Ability to configure alerts for SLA threshold activity based
on individual preferences
Ability to manage SLA metrics when cases are
assigned/reassigned within workflow
Ability to automate routing of approvals/rejections based
on predefined business rules and roles
Ability to generate unique IDs for service requests,
incidents, problems, changes and release records
–Survey–
Ability to compose a survey/questionnaire that scores
various aspects of the service provided by the service desk
Ability to send out an e-mail/link to customer satisfaction
survey to a customer requesting feedback on support
Ability to generate scores received from a survey activity
–Usability Incident & Problem Process–
Ability to configure the graphical user interface by
dynamically adding windows or fields
Ability for the solution to provide simple, Web-based
graphical user interface
Ability of the solution to enable rapid deployment of new
users and administration of existing users
Ability to configure the graphical user interface based on
individual, group or role-based preferences (colors, layout,
etc.)
Ability to provide industry and ITIL best-practice processes,
categorization and templates embedded in tool
Allows for attaching documents as soft copies and not as
images
Ability to provide configurable incident process and
categorization predefined templates
Ability to provide standard required incident record data
fields
Ability to provide predefined incident process templates
based on industry best practices and/or ITIL
Ability to support distinct incident records and problem
management processes, metrics and reporting
Ability to support hierarchical escalation, either manually or
via business rules, upon incident status change, priority
change and/or service-level clock expiration
Ability of the tool to facilitate the automatic prioritization,
assignment and escalation of Incidents based on the record
categorization
Ability to prevent closure of an incident before all
assignments have been resolved and mandatory fields are
completed
Ability to support bidirectional communication of Incident
information to and from the end user via e-mail
Ability to support highly flexible routing of incidents based
on available resources located across multiple sites and
other factors, such as time of day, tiered service values, etc.
Ability to differentiate between an incident and a service
request
Ability to spawn one or more incident(s) to a problem, and
to link all related incidents to the problem, with
corresponding notifications
Ability to select and create “quick incidents” from a list of
predefined templates with prepopulated content, such as
categorization, text, etc.
Ability to open an Request for Change(RFC) against an
incident, and automatic population of the RFC
Ability to manage and link incident records to multiple SLAs
and tiers of service based on IT customer groups or
associated lines of business
Ability to assist the service technician in determining the
existence of any duplicate, currently open incident or
problem tickets
Ability to search knowledge base for solutions/work-
arounds, and to push knowledge base articles that match
error categorization
Ability to automatically escalate and notify one or more
groups when a change has not been started or completed
on time
Ability to denote particular customers or groups of
customers as “VIP” status, indicating a higher level of
service
Ability to create subtasks within incident records
Ability to integrate with event and alert monitoring tools,
and allow for automatic creation, update and closure of
tickets from these tools
Ability to provide for documenting and managing
knowledge artifacts pertaining to problem and error control
(e.g., data entry point for knowledge management
databases, posting of FAQs)
Ability to integrate with chat tools, remote-control tools
and phone systems
Ability to put incident tickets “on hold,” by status definition,
with time excluded from the SLA/operating-level agreement
(OLA)
Ability to allow for multiple types of alerts (via SMS and e-
mail), including deadline alerts, excessive reassignment
alerts and inactivity alerts
Ability to automatically update status or close all related
incidents to a problem upon updating of status or closure of
the problem
Ability to automate opening of a problem record from an
incident record based on business rules and SLAs
Ability to track the total amount of time the incident was
worked on and how long it was open
Ability to facilitate the creation, modification and closure of
problem records
Ability to assign impact and urgency codes to problem
records
–Knowledge
Management–
Ability to provide knowledge management capabilities by
floating the most relevant hits to the top, in order of closest
match to search
Ease of administering the weighting and relevancy scores
associated with knowledge articles
Ability to launch fast knowledge searches using the
categorization (or partial categorization) selections as key
value search parameters
Ability to create a knowledge article via a fill-in-the-blank
form
Ability to automatically populate a knowledge article into an
incident
Ability to support role-based knowledge items (i.e., a
technical role can access either technical-facing or
customer-facing articles)
The ability to automatically create knowledge management
entries from incident, problem and change modules
Ability to manage full life cycle of knowledge articles
through administration capabilities (e.g., submission,
editing, review, approval, publishing, usage monitoring,
etc.)
Ability for knowledge management database to be
restricted access by role
Ability for tool’s knowledge management database to
search other knowledge bases in environment
Ability to have a rich-text editor (RTE) that supports links
within documents, document-to-document links and
attaching images to documents
Ability to provide automated administration (ease of
adding, editing and maintaining the data, and ability for
end-user submission to require review/approval prior to
posting)
Ability to have a defined workflow process for reviewing
and approving pending knowledge articles that can be
displayed graphically
Ability to make certain fields in the knowledge article
template mandatory
Ability to embed Web links, images and objects into
knowledge articles (e.g., screenshots, etc.)
Ability to support a variety of search methodologies,
including metadata, fuzzy searching, hierarchical/drill-
downs, cross-references, attribute queries, category, Web
and file system external library searches, and to utilize
natural language and proper stemming, and Boolean search
methodology
Ability to allow user feedback to rate/score content for
usefulness related to the inquiry
Self Service
Ability to provide a customer self-service portal where a
customer may access knowledge base articles and FAQs,
submit and update requests, and monitor the status of their
requests
Ability for the end user to search knowledge base for
solution via keyword, Boolean operators and full-text search
Ability to provide a “suggestion box” for soliciting feedback
on process and interface
Ability to associate end users with specific groups, lines of
business, etc., and to tailor presented content, information
and self-service options according to rule-based
“subscriptions” for roles or groups
Ability to provide a list of “top 10” common FAQs searched,
with automated updates based on update rules
Ability to develop, deliver and manage survey of end users
supporting self-service usage
Ability to integrate chat to support self-service usage
Ability to brand self-service portal in line with remaining
intranet and public portals and based on Company brand
guidelines
