My Remedy what!? has been resolved???

By Christopher Strauss, Computing Systems Support Database Administrator

Wondering what the following E-mail message that you just received means? Are you curious about what Remedy is, and why it is sending you mail?

From: arsystem@remedy.acs.unt.edu

Subject: Case 000000000000999 has been resolved.

To: <your email address here>

Your Remedy Case 000000000000999, Short Desc: <a problem you may remember having> has been resolved. If the problem was NOT resolved, please contact (group/person) <a group name or acronym you have never heard of / a computer support person you think you might have talked to on the phone once, and a phone number that may look familiar>. This case closes automatically in 15 days.

The answer lies in a project that the University's computer support staff embarked upon well over a year ago. The Distributed Computer Support Management Team (DCSMT) of the University of North Texas, a subcommittee of the Information Resources Council (IRC), resolved in 1996 to select and deploy a campus-wide trouble call tracking system for computer support problems. We selected and purchased the Remedy Action Request System in the fall of 1997, spent the 1997-1998 school year installing, configuring, and customizing it. We have just finished a four month long project to implement the system in all of the campus computer support groups. All of the academic units and most of the administrative units have been trained and are now in production, using Remedy as their automated trouble call tracking system. As the use of this system increases on our campus, the likelihood that YOU will receive a message from arsystem@remedy.acs.unt.edu increases as well. You may find it useful to have a little bit of background information about our system, and about the messages it sends.

What Remedy is intended to do

The primary purpose of Remedy is to provide a central tracking system for every conceivable type of computer support action. Key features provided by this system are its ability to:

• Notify groups of support staff members by various means (E-mail, pager) as soon as a new case (trouble ticket) is entered into the system and assigned to them.

• Notify the customer via E-mail as the ticket is placed in various states such as "Work in Progress, Pending, Resolved, and Closed."

• Enables distributed support staff to quickly escalate problems to central computing staff where appropriate, while maintaining continuous feedback to the customer.

• Provides follow-up and escalation actions for problems that are not being resolved in a timely manner.

• Empower the customer to decide whether or not the problem was resolved, and if not, allow them to easily reopen the ticket (once ARWeb has been deployed) and notify the support staff immediately of that fact.

• Store solutions to problems in a database that can be searched directly from the trouble ticket screen, and will ultimately be available to all customers as well.

• Once ARWeb is in production, it will enable customers to enter their own trouble tickets into interactive Web forms that are forwarded directly to their primary computer support staff (either the distributed area or the central helpdesk).

A word on escalations

Remedy ships with a fairly simple escalation process. Cases that age to a certain threshold send an escalation message to the assigned group AND the group's manager that the case is now "escalated." The thresholds are 4 hours for Urgent, 8 hours for High, 2 days for Medium, and 4 days for Low priority cases. See www.unt.edu/remedy for more details on case urgency and prioritization. There is currently no escalation engine searching for aging tickets and re-escalating them as necessary. The system has this capability, and follow-on escalation processes will be added later as refinements.

What Remedy means to you

From a customer's perspective, Remedy will mean a number of things. For one, you can expect to be asked for your UNT ID number when calling computer support staff for assistance. This enables them to quickly pick your customer record out of the 34,000 already loaded into the system, and get on with recording the facts of your problem. If you have more than one role at the university (student and staff) you have more than one customer record in the system. They can search on name, but it is a little harder to do; the names are loaded from the HRMIS and SIMS mainframe databases and are in the form of your full, legal name, not what you usually go by.

For another, it means being told what your trouble ticket number is (the Remedy Case number you will see in E-mail later, minus all the leading zeros) if the support staff cannot resolve your problem over the phone. In part, this depends upon how the support staff in your college or administrative area is using Remedy. Some areas enter all work in the system as they take calls, while others only enter items that require follow-up actions. It depends a lot upon how large your support staff is. You may ask that they enter a trouble ticket for you if it is clear that they are not doing so, and you want this problem tracked through resolution and closure. Once ARWeb is running, you will be able to do this for yourself.

Finally, if you have an E-mail address in the system (ask, and the support staff person can look up what we have listed for you in your customer profile), you will get notification messages if or when your case is changed to one of the Remedy statuses. These are Work in Progress, Pending, Resolved, and Closed. The messages will look like the examples below, accounting for the fact that if the field contents are too long (especially Short Description), the message may be truncated somewhat by a character length limitation on the notification generator.

Work in Progress:

Subject: Case 000000000000999 is now in progress.

Work is now in progress on your Remedy Case 000000000000999, Short Desc: <whatever the support staff used to describe your problem>. If you have any information or questions, contact (group/person) <your distributed support group / member of that support group and a phone number>.

Pending:

Subject: Case 000000000000999 is Pending Requester Information.

Remedy Case 000000000000999 which you submitted is Pending Requester Information. If you have information or questions, contact (group/person) <your distributed support group / member of that support group and a phone number>.

Note: Possible choices (and explanations) for Pending are:

• Classroom Availability (we can't fix it while the classroom is in use)

• Micro Maintenance (we sent it to Micro Maintenance to fix, or are waiting on them to get here to fix it)

• Parts (we, a support contract rep, or Micro Maintenance need to obtain parts in order to install them)

• Requester Information (we asked you to try something, and have not heard back from you)

• Requester Availability (we cannot look at the problem until you are in your office and available)

• Software Availability (you asked us to install software that we do not have, or a newly released version that we do not have legally available yet)

• Staff Availability (either there are not enough of us to go around, or we have no one who is qualified to work on that problem until we hire a replacement)

• Testing (we are trying to recreate the problem you reported, or are testing a system before releasing it to you for use)

• Vendor Response (we have called the vendor about it and they have not given us a solution, or may not have responded yet, or they keep calling it a feature)

Also, cases that are Pending DO NOT ESCALATE, so you may want to keep an eye on them. Once ARWeb is up, you should be able to manually escalate a case yourself.

Resolved: (see the example at the beginning of the article)

Closed:

Subject: Case 000000000000394 has been closed.

Your Remedy Case 000000000000999, Short Desc: <whatever the support staff used to describe your problem>, has been closed. The closure code is Automatically Closed. Contact (group/person) <your distributed support group / member of that support group and a phone number> if this problem reoccurs in the future.

The text in these messages has been refined several times since we started deploying the system. The messages that shipped with the product were more cryptic and less helpful. They are still rather limited by the length of the text that we can include. These messages will change once ARWeb has been deployed, and will include a direct link that will take your Web browser to the UNT Remedy Website, prompt you to log in, and then will go directly to your trouble ticket. Until then, they will include support group telephone numbers whenever possible to facilitate your contacting them.

Future Remedy capabilities for UNT customers

As mentioned above, the next major component of Remedy that we expect to deploy is ARWeb. ARWeb is a JavaScript-based Website product that provides direct access to the Remedy system. Customers will authenticate to this system with essentially the same login and password that they use to authenticate to the Library CD-ROM Website now (http://irservices.library.unt.edu/Welcome/). Once connected, they will be able to:

• Enter trouble tickets for themselves in an interactive Web form.

• Check the status of their own trouble tickets, close them once they have been resolved, and reopen them if they have not really been resolved.

• Search the solution knowledgebase before opening a new trouble ticket.

• Fill out a customer satisfaction survey, following a prompt after trouble call closure.

For those who want to know more about Remedy, and why we selected it for the University of North Texas

Who is Remedy Corporation? According to their own annual report at www.remedy.com:

"Remedy Corporation is the world's leading provider of automated help desk solutions designed to increase employee and organizational productivity across the enterprise. Addressing the needs of the consolidated operations management (COM) market, Remedy's easy to use and deploy, scalable, and highly adaptable technology and products extend beyond the help desk to include such applications as change management, asset management, defect tracking, and more."

The Remedy Action Request System is not a homebrew application, nor is it cheap, but it is one that is used on an international scale by organizations such as 3M, AT&T, EDS, CNN, DoD, Boeing, Pacific Bell, Bell Canada, Telecom Italia, and AutoDesk. A large number of universities have Remedy in production, and we have been in contact with many of them while bringing up our system: Baylor Medical, Duke, Harvard, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Georgia Tech, Missouri, Northwestern, NYU, Ohio State, Stanford, University of Georgia, University of Miami, and University of Houston.

Of these, Northwestern University the one of the most extensive deployments, with a large number of their business applications unified around a single, central Remedy database of university customers. Ohio State has used Remedy to automate almost every aspect of computer E-mail account creation, management, and problem resolution for 70,000 customers on five campuses. As you can imagine, the computer support staff at UNT will be looking for ways to incorporate useful and proven ideas from the more experienced administrators at other universities into our own system. We are confident that we made a good choice in selecting a powerful, adaptable, and almost infinitely customizable system for our campus computer users.

The Significance of the University of North Texas Implementation of the Remedy Action Request System

For the first time in UNT computing history, a common software package has been chosen, purchased, and implemented by all computing support areas with these shared goals:

• Prevent and solve computing problems in a timely manner.

• Bring central and distributed computing support areas together.

• Provide a tool to measure and justify support costs.

• Combine expert knowledge from all of the support areas into one central database.

• Reduce knowledge-loss when employees leave UNT, a recurring problem in our technical support staff areas.

A campus-wide selection and implementation project is NOT the norm for the majority of those universities that use Remedy. Almost every other campus that uses it (or a competing helpdesk automation product) has only a partial implementation, in some of their academic units or administrative areas. By our decision to do this as a university-wide project, we are already much closer to reaching our goals than many campuses that have been using Remedy for years. The Call Tracking Implementation Group (Remedy Steering Committee) will continue to work towards achieving these goals as we refine the system and add capabilities to it.

Note: Anyone curious to know more about the Remedy project at UNT may explore the www.unt.edu/remedy Website, which provides information to system users and contains the documentation of the project. The Steering Committee Website is at www.cascss.unt.edu/calltrax.n