IT service management

1. WebMD on IT Service Management
September, 2011

2. Agenda
About WebMD
Architecture and implementation
Key features and tips
Acknowledgement
Q/A
2

3. About WebMD
• Most Recognized & Trusted Brand of Health Information
• Serves consumers, physicians, other healthcare professionals, employers and health
plans.
• 105 million visitors/month on both desktop and mobile platforms
3

4. What we had…
One single ticket flow and ticket
Inadequate data management
Manual dispatch mechanism
Prone to human errors
Poor report
4

5. Business Needs
Simple, cost-effective, flexible IT Service Desk that tracks
– 1600 corporate employees’ helpdesk requests
– 250 employees in the technology department service requests’ that
are fielded by individual technical operations groups
Incident & problem management
Change & notification management
Release management
5

6. Our ITSM System Evaluation Check List
6

7. Why We Chose Serena For ITSM
1. Functionality
2. Needs
3. Maintenance and administration
4. Integration
5. User impact
6. Cost
7. Support
8. Future growth
7

8. Design Consideration
Simulate across-team interactions and communications
Ticket hierarchy to represent different ITSM tiers
Business process oriented
Minimize human input
Focus on business tasks
Efficient reporting
8

9. Ticket Hierarchy
acronym hierar ticket type purpose input submitter owner parent
chy
RM L4 release management, portal PM PM -
management communication project name
EE L3 environment management, environment PM PM RM
engagement communication
CD L2 code drop management, code drop number* (auto QA QA EE
communication counter)
AB L1 application build service request Product QA techops CD
Application
Build information
SR L1 other ops and dm service request depends on different request type IT dm or ops AB or standalone
requests
9

10. Ticket Submission Tree
10

11. Results
We decided to start our ITSM project with SBM
Scope of implementation
– ITSM – release management Q3/2010
– ITSM – incident management Q4/2010
– Employee Request Q1/2011
– ITSM – notification/change management Q3/2011
Summary as of 7/31/2011
– Monthly release since Q4/2011 – 111 change requests
– ITSM service requests – 13812
– Employee requests – 5355
– Incident management – 1519
11

12. Key features
Group-based privilege management
Parent-child ticket model
Leverage Aux table
Automatic ticket title and event counter
Integrated approval process
SBM Mobile
Custom report
SERENA SOFTWARE INC. 12
12

13. Parent/Child ticket model
Sub-task transition
– Higher tier tickets as parent, lower tier ones as children
– Data inheritance: users don’t need to input fields that
exists in higher tiers already
– Process control with transition action
• Example 1: Code drop ticket stays in process state until
all its children (build deployment) are completed.
• Example 2: After code drop is approved, all its children
(stay in review state) are pushed to backend operation
team.
13

14. Leverage Aux Table-1
Aux tables and data management
– More than 10 aux tables are created.
– Used as single/multiple relational fields in workflows
– Data of each aux table is managed by different team: less
maintenance overhead for SBM admin team
– Example:
• Product, Application tables are owned by Product
Operation teams
• OS table is owned by System Operation team
• VLAN table is owned by Net Operation team
14

15. Leverage Aux Table-2
Ticket assignment by aux item selected
– Submitter should be able to submit a ticket without knowledge of
backend supporting engineers
– Create User field in aux table
– Use mashup script to set ticket owner as user field from a relational
field (aux item)
– Example: All build deployment tickets are dispatched based on the
selected “Product”
• CMS product aux item has CMS ops team as product owner
• Submitter selects “CMS” in “product” relational field
• Mashup script makes the CMS ops team as the ticket owner
15

16. Automatic Title and Counter
Auto generated ticket title
– To avoid miscommunication and human error, most ticket
titles are auto generated
– Use SBM script and custom data fields to generate title
• Code drop title = Portal + Release title + Environment +
code drop# (Consumer R9 QA01 cd#5)
• Build title = Portal + Release title + Environment + code
drop# + application (Consumer R9 QA01 cd#5 ATS)
16

17. Integrated Approval Process
Live Code drop approving process
– In WebMD, all live (production) code drops require
approval from upper managers
– After submitter creates all the build deployment tickets
under a code drop, use JavaScript to block action buttons
of the build tickets – all tickets stay in “submitter review”
state
– Once code drop is approved, transition action will transfer
all the build tickets to operation teams
– If rejected and submitter decides to cancel the code drop,
transition action will withdraw all build tickets
17

18. SBM Mobile
Designed for approval process
SMS with SBM URI to access the ticket with SBM Mobile
sbmmobile://firstaid.mobile.webmd.net/tmtrack/tmtrack.dll?View&I=$RECORDID()&T=$TABLEID()
18
18

19. Reports
One of the key requirement of the ITSM project is to create
meaningful reports for
– Upper management
– Project manager
– Team owner/member
– Individual users
19

20. Status Report
Multi-view Report for request breakdown by request type - SysOps
Multi-view Report for product status and request breakdown by team - ProdOps
20

21. Application Version Report
Show latest closed tickets for each application in each
environment
PM uses the report to check which application version is
deployed in each environment
21

22. Acknowledgement
Serena Software Inc.
– John Hastings-Kimball
– Kartik Raghavan
– Digant Shah
– Rick Tyler
Key contributors in WebMD
– Teresa Dietrich – Senior Director, Technical Operations
– Roger Hsu – Lead Production Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering
– Derek Chang – Director, Site Reliability Engineering
22
22

23. Q/A
23

24. Supplemental Material
24

25. Release Management
25

26. Environment Engagement
26

27. Code Drop
27

28. Build Deployment Form
28

29. Application Deployment Flow
29

30. Incident Management
• Incident Management
Report 1 Report 2 Report 3
Incident Ticket
Response 1 Response 2
Review 1
Review 2
30