Relating people, organizations, and groups to Assets

To manage your assets efficiently, you can relate people, support groups, and other organizational structures to different assets. The people who are related to the assets will have a role associated with their relationship.

For example, a new laptop is provisioned to a new salesperson. The salesperson would be related to the laptop directly as a "Used By" relationship type. This indicates the user of the asset. A "Help Desk" support group would also be related to this asset using the "Supported By" role, indicating the team of people who would be responsible for fixing or helping with the asset (helpful for assignment routing). Also, a management team might be assigned as the "Approved By" role, indicating that changes shouldn't be made to this asset by anyone unless it has been approved by this individual.

Required permissions

People relationships can also impact a user's ability to view and modify an asset, especially in multitenant environments.

An Asset User must meet the following conditions to view or modify an asset:

Role	Must fulfill at least one condition	Permission to
Asset User	The user has unrestricted access enabled. The user belongs to the same company as the Asset. The user must be associated with the Asset either directly or indirectly through a group the user is already a part of.	View assets
Asset User	The user also has Asset Administrator permissions. The user must be associated with the Asset by a Supported By relationship type, either directly or indirectly, though a group the user is already a part of. A CMDB Administrator has provided a row-level write security permission to the user either directly or indirectly through a group the user is already a part of.	Modify assets

To view people relationships with assets

You can view the existing people relationships that are configured with an asset by opening the People tab on the asset details page.

Important

The Type field might not be populated in old datasets that have been migrated from older versions. If you want to have the Type information, you must delete and recreate the record. The Type information is not required for any system functionality. This field helps users distinguish between the different types of relationships.

To create people relationships with assets

In Asset Console, open the asset that you want to relate with people.
In the People tab, click + People.
From the People type list, select the option that you want to relate to the asset.
Search for the record that you want to relate to the asset.
Depending on the selected people type, you might need to specify the Company field as well. Populate the company if necessary and provide a search term.
Tip
You can use "%" as a wildcard for searching.
From the list provided in the table, select the Person, Support Group, or Organization that you want to relate.
From the Role list, select how do you want to relate the selected people type:
- Approved by — The individual or the group, who approved the change requests for the CI. An example of the group is Change Advisory Board (CAB) that approves change requests related to the CI.
- Created by — The individual who created the CI.
- Managed by — The service manager, usually an individual, who is accountable for the business service CI.
- Owned by — The individual or the team that owns the CI. The owner is responsible for delivering services related to the CI.
- Supported by — The individual or the team that supports the CI. Incidents for the CI are usually assigned to this group. To modify the CI, you must be a part of the supported group.
- Used by— The user to whom the CI is assigned. This is usually done for end-points such as laptops, phones, or printers. This role gives you the additional ability to access the CI at an organization, company, or department level. It also gives you the access to the CI from other applications (for example, Incident Management or Change Management). The Used By role is also used by software license management for compliance.
  
  Click to view a real-world example of roles
  
  The order management system is a business service for managing the entire lifecycle of orders. The service manager accountable to the business users of this service have the Managed by role for this CI. The Order Management application development team continually delivers new capabilities and fixes defects for the technical services that this business service is comprised of. The CI has an Owned by relationship with the Order Management app dev team. The back office support team offers Level 1 support for the Order Management application. They have a Supported by role with this CI. The Business Applications director may want to approve all changes to all applications in the order management business service. The Order Management application may have an Approved by relationship with the Business Applications director.
Click Add.
The relationships are displayed on the People tab of the asset details.

To delete people relationships with assets

In Asset Console, open the asset from which you want to remove people relationship.
Select one or more relationships that you want to delete and click Delete.
On the Confirmation Dialog box, click Yes.
You get a confirmation message after the relationships are removed.

Instructions for classic interfaces

View instructions for Mid Tier

In the Mid Tier interface, you can relate more than one person, organization, or support group to configuration items (CIs). You can also relate different people or groups to the same CI, with different roles and also relate a CI to people who manage, support, or own the CI. For example, if you provide a new salesperson with a laptop, you can relate that person to the laptop. And, if you know the support group responsible for repairing laptops, you can also relate that support group to the laptop.

In a multitenancy environment, a user can access a CI record only if one of the following conditions is met:

The user belongs to the same company as the CI.
On the People tab, you create a Supported by or Used by relationship to a people organization. The user is a member of the same company as the people organization.
The user has unrestricted access to all companies.

Permissions required to modify a CI

The following users can modify a CI:

The user with the Asset Admin permission can modify any CI that the user can access.
The user with the Asset User permission must be a member of the support group that is associated with the CI by the Supported by role.
The admin can provide a row-level write security permission to the users of a group to modify the CIs. For more information, see Setting the Normalization Engine permissions for multi-tenancy.

After you create the relationship, you can modify the role assigned to the record. For more information about modifying the role, see Modifying an assigned role for people, organizations, or groups related to a CI.

To relate a person, an organization, or a group to a CI

In Mid Tier, open a CI, as described in Searching for tickets, assets, resources, and people in BMC Helix ITSM.
Click the People tab, and click Add.
On the Relate People form, existing people relationships are displayed in the Current People Relationships section.
In the Select Type section, select the required the person, organization, or group and follow the steps in the table below:
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In the Select Role section, select the role that the person, organization, or department performs in relation to the CI.
The various options are:
- Approved by — The individual who approved the CI.
- Created by — The individual who created the CI.
- Managed by — The individual who manages the CI.
- Owned by — The owner of the CI.
- Supported by — The people who support the CI. To modify the CI, you must be a part of the supported group.
- Used by— The people who are the users of the system. This role gives you the additional ability to access the CI at an organization, company, or department level. It also gives you the access to the CI from other applications (for example, Incident Management or Change Management). The Used By role is also used by software license management for compliance.
  All the roles can be used in the approval process of a CI. For more information, see Configuring approval mappings for people and support groups based on the CI related to a release.
Click Add.
The related record appears on the People tab on the CI Information form.

To modify an assigned role for people, organizations, or groups related to a CI

In Mid Tier, open a CI, as described in Searching for tickets, assets, resources, and people in BMC Helix ITSM.
Click the People tab.
Select the record that contains the role you want to modify, and click Modify Role.
In the Relate People dialog box, select the new role and click OK.

The role that the person, organization, or department performs in relation to the CI is updated to the new role that you selected.