Defining Your Organization

Organizations, such as companies, are divided into separate groups, referred to as organizational units. Use an organizational unit hierarchy to apply structure to your organization. Creating a parent-child structure of organization units can prove useful for data segregation and organizational security.

A hierarchy structure also lets you manage permissions between tiers. For example, a member of a Service Desk Manager management-level tier could be allowed to view the incidents assigned to all Service Desk Analysts who are in a lower tier.

An organizational unit is stored as a business object (called org unit), which can be modified by administrators and seen on a view-only basis by others depending on their role. By default, all new employees are added to the default organizational unit.

You can create organizational units from the Configuration Console. See Supporting Organizations.

Organizational units are used in these ways:

• If the Service Level Management (SLM) module is installed at your site, an organizational unit has subscribed to a service level agreement.
• Service catalogs are published to one or more organizational units.

Roles govern the access for a user to the business objects in HEAT. Roles control which workspaces are available to users when they log in. Each role has its own workspace definition, which you specify as part of the overall configuration for a role.

When you configure a role, you can specify one of the default workspaces supplied in HEAT , or define custom workspaces by selecting screen elements, including the primary business object and primary object layout display. HEAT workspace options are grouped within top level tabs at the top of the browser window. Users select which workspace to view by clicking its supporting tab.

See About Roles for a list of possible roles and related tasks.

The system provides a user named InternalServices by default to support the workflow and escalation engines. This user only has the administrator role. Do not delete this user, enable it with other roles, or delete it from the role. Doing so will disable the workflow and escalation features.

Employees are grouped together into teams. Employees who will receive incident, change, or problem assignments must belong to at least one team because assignments are given to teams and use team email rather than individual email. Individual employees, depending on their work load or function, can be on one or more teams.

A group is made up of one or more employees who are approvers or decision-makers in the approval process. See Using Employees, Using Teams, and Using Contact Groups for more information on setting these up.