How is Doing the Implementation of IT Services Management at MUNI? Projects Overview

Projects and other activities have been taking place at ICS for over a year, intending to implement selected principles and recommendations from ITSM (IT Service Management). Let's look back and summarize how we are doing, whether we are delivering what we have promised, and the state of implementation of ITSM. However, we divided the report into two parts because there are many changes, activities, and projects. In the first one, we present the status of these strategic projects: Central requirements collection and management, Increasing the degree of operational processes automation, and MUNI DataWarehouse for supporting data-based organization management.

29 Nov 2021 Filip Janovič Article

Central Requirements Collection and Management

Within this project, we are currently preparing the deployment of the Jira requirements management tool. By the end of 2021, we will deploy it on IT ServiceDesk, ensuring that requests for our first line (L1) are recorded and managed by the process we designed within implementing incident management ("something went wrong") and requirements management ("I want something "). This automates previously implemented activities, such as incident reporting (which has so far been done manually), and simplifies related work on finding causes and learning from them. We can mention the results, e.g., reducing the occurrence of critical incidents, reducing initial chaos in dealing with outages and problems, or a single place for operational documentation. On the one hand, these activities help to reduce the time it takes to resume service operation and, in the case of larger incidents, make it easier to identify and coordinate solutions thanks to clearly visible patterns.

× We Wish to Get Rid of	✓ We Wish to Have
„...it is not my job...“ „... I have written to xy and he/she told me...“	to know who, what, in what role and in what scope is doing
instead of never ending calls and chats with random people	to know where to find necessary information when I’m not sure
„...hey, does it work for you?“	to simplify work by automatization, for example automatic services checking and information in case of an incident

Examples of what we wish to get rid of, from an article published in January 2021: Pavlína (Pao) Špringerová, „Service Instead of Technology 2“

What Next?

As the next phase of the project for the first quarter of 2022, we will implement a pilot university workplace in this unit, namely the Faculty of Arts, RECETOX, and selected ICS support teams. However, work on deploying an entry point for it.muni.cz does not end with implementing a tool to manage these requirements. At the beginning of 2022, we will focus on building a central platform for reporting requirements - a "Self-service" portal for students and employees.

MUNI DataWarehouse – What We Do not Measure, We Can not Control

In other words, we need data in one place, which we achieve technologically by building a data warehouse. This strategic project is being carried out in cooperation with the Rector's Office and an external company specializing in this issue. The goal is to create a minimal product in a short time (end of February 2022).

We want to create clear reports for IT service owners in the "on-demand" mode, which will show for them (and for us) the state of the service, how many people use it, whether it is stable and does not have frequent outages. This data will provide the main inputs for working with the service, developing it, and deciding what to pay more attention to. We will move from "I have a feeling…" and "For this we have no money or capacity..." to "decide based on the data what to keep and manage, and what to cancel." Pavlína (Pao) Špringerová, „Service Instead of Technology 2“, January 25, 2021)

We build MUNI DataWarehouse following modern and scalable technologies. We try to use mainly SaaS services provided by the Microsoft Azure platform, such as Data Factory or PowerBI.

As part of this pilot implementation, we will cover output reporting focused on CPS operation data and the RECETOX center's economic issues.

Automation – SMART

To be able to do development activities, we need to free our hands from the operation. Implementing the above tools will look for cases where operational activities can be either automated or delegated. By delegating requirements solutions, we want to ensure that IT service providers, for example, in faculties, can manage and administer services themselves and do not have to "wait" - in some cases - for lengthy solutions.

This problem is to be solved by a new platform for increasing automation and delegation - SMART (Service MAnagment Remote Tools). The goals of this project are mainly:

Integration of administrative activities into the common operating platform in the new frontend
Create the ability to delegate activities to other people or teams
Sequential automation and time saving
Replace fragmented tools (single-purpose desktop applications) and integrate them into the new platform
"Management of ICT services in one place"

The cornerstones are currently being implemented in the form of a microservice architecture. By the end of 2021, we are going to create at least one case on which we will verify the functionality of the platform.

All the mentioned projects are managed by the project office of the Institute of Computer Science. If you are interested, we will be happy to provide you with more detailed information; you can contact us at it@muni.cz.

In the second part of the article describing the status of the projects, "How is Doing the Implementation of IT Services Management at MUNI?", we will then focus in more detail on the services themselves - but we will keep that until the next time.