3.3 What Do Customers Need Support For?

ZENworks Service Desk has a centralized Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to manage and control infrastructure information. At the simplest level the CMDB can be used to store hardware, software and document asset details. At its most complex, the CMDB can be configured as an enterprise wide IT business service catalogue defining business services and the supporting infrastructure. Essentially, it's a list of 'stuff' to be supported and (potentially) relationships to each other.

Each department or group that you will be meeting will have items that they want supporting. To help focus these meetings, prepare a list of your own based on I.T understanding of the current environment. This should be at a high level looking at categories of items rather than specifics e.g Desktops, Laptops, Desktop applications, Printers etc.. You then can put specific items under each category and add additional categories if needed.

ZENworks Service Desk already has a number of categories defined which can be used as a starting point.

A good place to look for items to put onto the list is a configuration management tool such as ZENworks Configuration Management. You can use this to audit your environment and then generate a report to help create the initial list.

After the initial set of meetings, you should end up with a list similar to the example below:

Category

Item

Department

Description

Hardware

Lenovo W500

Sales

Standard laptop used by sales teams

Hardware

Dell R710

I.T

ACME corporate standard server

Printers

HP LaserJet P4015DN

Marketing

Marketing department printer

Software

Salesforce

Sales , Marketing, Corporate

Company wide CRM system

Software

Email

All

Company wide email system

There will be items that the business is not aware of, but I.T are. An example of this would be backups. Make sure that you add these.