Crucial Data for IT Tickets

When you start designing a from scratch Ticketing system for your IT Department things a be a bit overwhelming. There are many programs out there that do the same thing but seem too busy, complex or just too expensive to implement.

Over the past year I have been working with contractors to deploy an in house ticketing system for our IT requests. For us third party options were too complex for a extremely small help desk to utilize, and ones that were free (i.e. Spiceworks) were too busy with unnecessary information for us. We went about creating the ticketing system however had little idea of what data we needed to capture in the system once it went live to users.

We started with the basics:

1. Issue
2. Due(Priority)
3. User
4. Category
5. Response Method

We found that users don't chose category's like we do so we hid that field for them and left the others. Due responses always defaulted to the slowest time (for us it was "within a week"), and the user field auto populated with the user who was logged into the web page. This could be changed but most users just wanted their name in there.

From their your case my differ, but its a good start to gathering data from your users via a ticketing system instead of phone calls and stop by's.

Meeting Industry Security Standards for Information Technology

Just remember that meeting industry standards for security in your IT Department is much like how the Titanic met shipping standards for life boats back in 1912.