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• When processing an incident, an ITIL user should be able to determine which DSP group supports a particular user so that the incident can be routed to the appropriate DSP group.
• DSP managers need to be able to report at the end of the month the time worked for each support contract so they can accurately bill the orgs
• DSPs need to be able to filter tickets assigned to their groups by the contract of each client's org so they can constrain by the contracts they support
• DSP managers need counts of the users supported by a given contract so they can appropriately staff the contract support groups

Fields

To accomplish correct assignment, it was initially decided that the user table (sys_user) would have a visible field "DSP Group" (u_dsp_group) which would be populated by a business rule. The DSP contracts were loaded (one time) into the service contracts table (ast_service). The organization table was given a custom field to point each org back to exactly one contract. These relationships were initially loaded one time. Over time, the date in the user table became stale and a way was eventually established to update it regularly (see below). Currently, DSP group assignment is made reliable through a UI action that implements the business rule. 

To deal with billing, a Currently, DSP group assignment is made reliable through a UI action that implements the business rule. 

To deal with billing, a "bill to contract" field was added to task_time_worked. Upon insertion of each task time worked entry, business logic records a DSP contract to bill as appropriate.

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Since there is no official data ensconced in an existing database, and we didn't feel like adding a role and ACLs at the time, it was desirable to delegate we delegated responsibility for the data source to something other than the contracts tableoutside of ServiceNow. So a formatted spreadsheet was placed in Box.com and paired with a data source transform map in ServiceNow. Multiple people have edit access, and they are responsible for editing workflow. The import is based on the below data contract.

Data Contract

• The DSP organization is responsible for the source data content
• spreadsheet containing data will exist at https://yale.box.com/shared/static/k53bk7qymee6t5g7j85u.xls (don't delete the file, or this will break)
• must remain XLS (Excel 97/2000) format
• must remain publicly accessible
• headers must be "Contract Number", "Active?", "Short Description", "Assignment Group", "Organizations"
  • Contract Number should be unique (enforced upon import)
  • Active? must TRUE or FALSE
  • Assignment Group should match an existing group (or it will be rendered as empty)
  • Organizations should be a space-delimited list of valid orgs (invalid orgs will not register upon import)
  • Each organization should map to one contract only (last match wins)
  • The data will be loaded daily at midnight.

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Implementation

Group Assignment

"When processing an incident, an ITIL user should be able to determine which DSP group supports a particular user so that the incident can be routed to the appropriate DSP group."

This is facilitated via a UI action called "Assign to DSP Group", which is available in Incident and SC Task forms. It chooses a group by the rules described above.

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