What does Remedy do for the University of North Texas?

Background information on the Remedy Action Request System as implemented at our University.

What Remedy does for the University

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:

• Notifies 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.
• Notifies the customer via e-mail when a new trouble ticket is created, and when that 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.
• Empowers the customer to decide whether or not the problem was resolved, and if not, allows them to easily reopen the ticket via ARWeb or Remedy Web, which automatically notifies the support staff of that fact.
• Stores 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.
• Enables 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 Case Urgency, Priority, and Response (Escalation) Times 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

Interpreting the Messages and Using the ARWeb Interface to Respond

From a customer's perspective, Remedy means a number of things. For one, you can expect to be asked for your UNT Enterprise Userid (EUID) or UNT ID number when calling computer support staff for assistance. This enables them to quickly pick your customer record out of the 56,000 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 will have more than one customer record in the system. They can search on name, but it is slightly 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 may 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. With ARWeb, you are 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 when the new case is created, and when your case is changed to one of the various Remedy statuses. These are Work in Progress, Pending, Resolved, and Closed. The messages will look like the examples documented here, 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.  Several of them contain World Wide Web URLs (Universal Resource Locators) that lead to a web interface where you can modify your trouble ticket directly, and fill out a Customer Satisfaction Survey.

What does Remedy do that is  for UNT customers (all computer and information system users)?

As mentioned above, the component of Remedy that will affect customers the most is ARWeb. The ARWeb interface is a JavaScript-based web site product that provides direct access to the Remedy system. As of December 1999, customers may authenticate to this system with essentially the same login and password (EUID and UNT ID) that they use to authenticate to the Library CD-ROM web site and WebCT courses now (computer support staff usually have a different login name - see "What is an EUID..." for more details). Once connected, they are 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.

THE BEST WAY TO ACCESS ARWeb IS TO START AT HELP DESK CENTRAL!!

Open the Help Desk Central Home Page at http://remedy.unt.edu/helpdesk .  Many useful links appear right on the home page, such as current Bulletins about system outages.  Select Customers on the top frame of the Web page, and you will find more detailed instructions as well as a list of links on the left that open directly into the ARWeb forms to the Remedy database.  Select Request Queues to see what cases are open in your business or academic unit.  BOOKMARK this Help Desk Central web for future reference; this is your one-stop shopping center for web-based technical support at the University of North Texas.

Additional Information

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

Who is Remedy? 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, AutoDesk, Bell Canada, Boeing, CNN, DoD, EDS, GTE Internet, Mobil, Pacific Bell, and Telecom Italia. 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, U of Georgia, U of Miami, and U of Houston.

Of these, Northwestern University has 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 over 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 only a few 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 web site, which provides information to system users and contains the documentation of the project. The Steering Committee web site is at www.cascss.unt.edu/calltrax.

Remedy: Take the Cure