Best Practices of handling Organization objects after organizational changes
Csaba_Rozinyak
Premier Partner IT Monkey ✭
Hi,
I am a Service Manager/Orchestrator consultant but new to Cireson Asset Management. One of my customers has recently carried out some organizational changes that we would like to reflect somehow in Asset Management with regards organizations. Asset Management has so far contained over 700 Organization objects in the \Configuration Items\Asset Management\Administration\Organizations\All Organizations view. Each has its own cost center and many of them are related to one or more software assets and work items. What concerns us the most though is the cost center in this scenario.
All these organizations were imported via a one-off CSV file that we received from HR. As far as I know HR will provide us with a new CSV file but we would like to understand the consequences of importing it. I know the connector allows not having to overwrite existing config items but in case we choose to do so additional new items would be created - if I am not wrong.
Our goal is to:
- minimize the number of organization items, if possible by merging them
- we would like to minimize the manual efforts of having to update all cost center codes
- understand what would be the best way to handle these configuration items when there are organizational changes where departments might get new names, others merged, etc.
When it comes to merging two organization config items, I have seen that there is a possibility to create a parent organization but I am not sure if this is what we are supposed to use instead of importing a new list.
Hoping someone could point out a few things to take into consideration or provide some direction 
.
KR,
Csaba
Answers
Minimising the number of organisation items by merging is possible if you have the same 'Organisation Name' in the new CSV and the old Objects. These will be overwritten with the data contained in the new CSV. There is still a history on the object to be able to refer to old data.
Updating Cost Center Codes in Organisation is as easy as having the Cost Center Code in the new CSV as a separate column and using the "Organisation has Cost Center" relationship during the import.
If an Organisation Name is changed, it best to Archive the old Organisation in Asset Management and create a new one representing the name change - you can then link the old organisation in related items in order to be able to identify the change.
As always, while the Asset Management piece is complex, it is also a framework which improves the default functionality provided by Microsoft. You can use it in any way, even by adding or combining customisations to it.
Hi Tony,
Thank you for your quick response and suggestions. I think we should look deeper into this to get our heads round it.
In our case, let's say we have a 5-letter organization naming standard at the lowest level where ABCDE could be for instance the networking team and ABCDF could be the SQL team, while ABCD could be a set of teams such as a combination of ABCDE + ABCDF. Then ABCD is also a part of the greater IT department that only has for instance 3 letters in its name, ABC. We would like to merge ABCDE and ABCDF-G-etc. so that they will end up in 1 single object and preferably as ABC or at least ABCD.
In addition, some of these may get an entirely new name, so ABCD in my example could end up becoming a combination of ABCDE + BBEFG (old ABCDF). So it is a kind of mix of merging and new names.
It sounds anyway as though we have to export all the existing Organizations and then:
1. create the new organizations with new names (which will have no previous history)
2. link the old organizations to the new organizations via Related Items as a kind of workaround for history - which means manually updating at least 300 new objects to include the existing 700 old objects
3. currently we have two separate connectors configured, one for importing organizations and one for importing cost center codes but based on your recommendation this sounds unnecessary since a new column for cost center codes in the new CSV file that is about to be imported through the "organization" connector should be sufficient using the right mapping.
Not sure yet if this all makes sense... we will have to test it anyway.
KR,
Csaba