Incident Management
Incidents happen every day within the IT systems and the challenge is to deal with them effectively. While weak incident management can have negative business impact, strong incident management can free valuable resources within an organization. When systems or processes fail, things can quickly go wrong . Business processes can come to a grinding halt, email and other communications can stop flowing. When these incidents happen, IT organizations need to manage them to a successful conclusion. How well an IT organization manages incidents can become the metric for overall performance evalutaion.
Incident Management aims to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse effect on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service-quality and -availability are maintained. An incident is any event which is not part of the standard operation of the service and which causes, or may cause, an interruption or a reduction of the quality of the service. The objective of the Incident Management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price.
The phases of resolving an incident are:
- Registration – recording information about the incident and escalate it to a competent expert
- Classification and initial support – comparison with known problems and errors, measurement of impact and priorities, provision of a temporary solution for restoring the normal operation until the cause of the accident is found and removed
- Investigation and diagnosis – assessment of the information about the incident, collecting and analyzing additional information and solutions seek
- Resolution and recovery – finding and applying a solution
- Closure – confirmation from the customer that he is satisfied
Incident Management reduces the negative impact on the company’s business. It’s a core process that every IT staff needs to master. Incident management is the linchpin that connects the community of IT services users to the resources for resolving incidents that exist within an IT company.