What’s changing?

In WiscIT, incidents have had dropdowns for Service, Category and Subcategory. Historically, values for “Service” have been generic buckets that do not meaningfully describe the issues at hand, e.g. Email, Calendar and Collaboration or DoIT Internal.

On January 10th, the WiscIT incident form will be updated with two changes:

1. The dropdown menus will be removed. Only a subcategory search bar will remain.
2. "Technical Service" will display instead of "Service". Technical Service is a term used by our CMDB, and the list of Technical Services most accurately reflects the full list of services that DoIT Provides.

If an incident is unclassified, the form will appear with a search bar for subcategories:

If an incident is classified, the form will display the Technical Service, Category, and Subcategory of the incident with a link to clear classifications.

What does this mean?

In the short term, little is changing. We’ve already been collecting data on Technical Service for incidents since the start of the fiscal year, and now we’re just making it visible to folks. There may be a little confusion as many incidents will now have the same (or similar) entries for both “Technical Service” and “Category”.

In the longer term, this will give WiscIT more consistency and flexibility in how service teams can use classifications to describe their incidents. Instead of being stuck to mostly Category and Subcategory, service teams will now have all three levels to classify incidents. It will also intertwine incidents more tightly with our CMDB, making for easier reporting and metrics.

How can I see these changes?

We have a dashboard that shows a variety of incident related information in WiscIT. In the Dashboard Manager it’s located in the folder Global > DoIT Dashboards and it’s called “Team Information Dashboard”. Use the “Select Team” button to display subcategory information for a given team:

Note: The Technical Service column won’t be there by default before Friday. You can right click any column and use “Customize Columns” to manually add this column.

Have questions?

Do you have questions about the changes that are taking place? Would you like to adjust your service’s categories and subcategories to provide more useful incident data? Please reach out to wiscit-feedback@doit.wisc.edu.