Q – Will tickets and other data be transferred into the new system?
A – No, we won’t be migrating any historic data. There are two options for change over: either re-enter any open tickets in to the new system (advised), or log a place-holder within the new system that refers to the ticket within the old system. Please bear in mind that the old system will become unavailable at some point in the future (date still TBC),
Q – Is there a way to retain visibility of incidents that need to be passed on to another team?
A – Yes, for ISS there is a ‘watch list’ facility which allows the analyst to monitor tickets regardless of which team they are assigned to. There are some restrictions on this, e.g. analysts will not be allowed to see some information security incidents.
Q – Will we have the ability to assign an incident to multiple teams (e.g. when it isn’t totally clear exactly where to route an incident or an incident may need input from more than one team and both could be investigating simultaneously)?
A – Yes, for ISS the incident management process will allow ‘tasks’ to be created against the incident ticket, where the original ticket is retained by the incident owner (or team) but the tasks can be assigned to other teams.
Q – Is there a recommended procedure for dealing with Changes logged as incidents or service requests in the interim until we get Change Management for ISS up and running?
A – Yes – we will have very simple Change and Problem ticket logging processes to allow creation of records. These processes will not have any real workflow behind them to begin with; Change Management is planned to be launched in full later in 2013.
Q – How long is it planned for the old system to be available?
A – That is still to be decided – we will retain it for as long as it’s needed for audit purposes, and it’s envisaged that there may be a requirement to use it as a look-up for a period after the new system goes live, however we no longer have support for the old system so we should be aware that if there are any major problems with it we may need to accept that it will no longer be useable.
Q – Can we add to and amend the categories over time, so that we can learn from and refine our initial set up once we have reporting analysis available?
A – The short answer is ‘yes’ – the longer answer is we would not want to amend the categories too much/too often as this will affect trend analysis, so it’s better to try to stick with the initial set-up if possible; however there is always the option to add something in that has been missed in the initial configuration