Minimizing the impact of consolidation
Following a successful consolidation, a mixture of ticket number formats might be present. Formats can include:
- Standard prefix only—Tickets that were not prefixed by BMC Helix Data Manager and are using the standard ITSM application prefix only. This typically occurs in the import consolidation scenario where a BMC Helix ITSM system is being consolidated with an existing system that does not have its data migrated by BMC Helix Data Manager. This also includes tickets created after consolidation and are generated without a prefix.
- Prefixed by BMC Helix Data Manager—For any consolidation scenario, at least one system must have its ticket numbers prefixed. If more than two systems are being consolidated, each system must have a unique transformation applied.
Following a consolidation, the incident form might hold incidents with the following example types of ticket numbers:
- INC000000000123
- INCDFK000000123
- INCPBJ000000123
The first example represents tickets that were already existing in the system prior to consolidation, migrated by BMC Helix Data Manager without transformation, or were created after consolidation. The last two examples were migrated from two distinct systems by using BMC Helix Data Manager.
Using the ticket number search facility, you can search for the transformed ticket numbers using the full number (for example, INCPBJ000000123) or with the string including the BMC Helix Data Manager prefix (PBJ000000123). Searches using only the numeric portion return the non-transformed incident (INC000000000123).
The custom prefix feature that BMC Helix ITSM provides allows only a single prefix to be substituted and is therefore not applicable to a consolidation scenario with mixed ticket number prefixes.
The following mitigation strategies help manage the impact of the transformation of ticket numbers as part of a consolidation.
High-level approach | Description |
|---|---|
Training | Help desk staff most frequently use the ticket number search facility to assist end users who quote only the numeric portion of their incident. Therefore, the highest impact occurs soon after consolidation when users are calling the help desk with open ticket numbers that have been consolidated from the originating system. To work around this issue, you should train your support engineers, particularly the help desk staff about how to search for tickets after a consolidation. |
Leading wildcard | Adjust the BMC Helix ITSM application workflow so that:
|
Structured query | Adjust the BMC Helix ITSM application workflow so that a structured query is created that includes all the variants of ticket number prefix currently used, for example: 'Incident Number' = "INCDFK000000123" OR 'Incident Number' = "INCPBJ000000123" OR 'Incident Number' = "INC000000000123" This results in all searches for ticket numbers being performed with an EQUALS match against the database. While the OR query is less efficient than searching for a single record, this query is more efficient than a LIKE query. If there are a fixed number of consolidations, the workflow can be hardcoded. However, if there will be more than one system consolidated into the target system, it might be beneficial to create data-driven workflow. |
If changes to workflow are planned, validate the performance of the proposed search method against your database because there can be considerable differences in the performance of different databases and different data sets.