URL: https://bu.service-now.com/
Owner: Central IS&T
Central IS&T Contact: ithelp@bu.edu
Address to Create a Ticket: questromhelp@bu.edu
This is the platform we use to manage incidents that happen throughout BU.
The company itself was founded in 2003 in Santa Clara, CA, and has grown since then to become the leader in its sector. You can find out more through their website, or their Wikipedia page.
You can also find out more reading our BU thematic section about it.
Incidents
An incident, by definition, is an occurrence that can disrupt or cause a loss of operations, services, or functions.
Incident management describes the necessary actions taken by an organization to analyze, identify, and correct problems while taking actions that can prevent future incidents.
Incident Management restores normal service operation while minimizing impact to business operations and maintaining quality.
If you want to know more about the workflow, ServiceNow has a tutorial here.
If you want to learn more about incidents at BU, please consult this section.
ServiceNow at BU
In practice, BU Central IS&T has a helpdesk that is responsible for routing tickets to us and other relevant departments.
In other words, anytime someone within BU is experiencing an IT related service disruption, they can create a virtual “ticket” and submit it for review. Central Helpdesk receives it and routes it to the right department.
Types of tickets and why we need them
Differentiating tickets allows IT departments to work more efficiently. IT specialists need to know what exactly they are dealing with to settle things, which is why ServiceNow has the following types of tickets:
- Incident (something that is unplanned and causes interruption to an IT service or reduces its quality).
- Problem (a severe malfunction, a cause behind a number of incidents).
- Request (something that users want to get from IT support or other involved departments).
- Change (a proposal to add, modify or remove something concerning IT services).
The crucial difference between an incident and a problem is that incident management is primarily aimed at restoring the normal flow of business processes as quickly as possible. And problem management aims to find the root cause behind a number of similar incidents to prevent such from happening again. If a ticketing system does not differentiate between these two essential concepts, this may pose a serious threat to IT operations. Ignoring the root cause of similar incidents and coming up with workarounds instead can lead to a substantial decrease in IT services’ efficiency.
Once we as Questrom IT receive the ticket, we then work through the issue and either solve it directly, or take steps to identify the right way/person to solve it.
At times, it might happen that we are contacted directly via email about certain issues. Well, in that case we tell the client to email questromhelp@bu.edu. This creates a ticket to ServiceNow which should be assigned to someone in our team. To learn more about how this work in practice, please refer to the tickets section.
If it’s us that need some help from Central IS&T, we can email them at ithelp@bu.edu, or we can create a ticket directly in ServiceNow.