2.3 Gather Other Important Information

You should also be familiar with other services that are running on the network and that rely on the infrastructure. You should prioritize these services to better understand bandwidth utilization and service levels that have been assigned to specific functions. If you are implementing ITIL best practices, you should know about all disciplines that are currently being leveraged.

You should collect information about the following:

  • Which Service Desk software is currently used and how does the deployment of ZENworks fit within this framework?

  • Does your organization have a formal Service Level Agreement (SLA) process in place? If yes, what is it and can you access the documentation that explains it?

  • What are your organization’s Disaster Recovery and Service Continuity plans? How does this impact the ZENworks design?

  • How does your organization plan for availability of services and resources? Are you fully aware of availability requirements?

  • Does your organization leverage a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)? If so, which CMDB? Does your organization have plans to include information that is stored in the ZENworks database in their CMDB?

  • Does your organization have a formal method to keep track of changes to applications that are published to the end-user communities?

  • Does your organization have a Definitive Software Library (DSL) and Definitive Hardware Library (DHL)?

  • Is your organization using another framework product in its infrastructure, such as IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, or HP OpenView?

  • Does your organization leverage other products, such as SAP?

  • What other major projects are currently taking place in your organization?