IT ARCHITECTS

What is Incident Management?

Incident Management restores normal service operation while minimizing impact to business operations and maintaining quality.
An incident, by definition, is an occurrence that can disrupt or cause a loss of operations, services, or functions.

Incident management describes the necessary actions taken by an organization to analyze, identify, and correct problems while taking actions that can prevent future incidents.

The importance of incident management

Incidents can disrupt operations, lead to temporary downtime, and contribute to the loss of data and productivity. It is increasingly crucial for organizations to take incident management practices seriously, as there are multiple benefits of it.

Some of these benefits include:

Better efficiency and productivity

There can be established practices and procedures that can help IT teams better respond to incidents and mitigate future incidents. Additionally, machine learning automatically assigns incidents to the right groups for faster resolution.

Dedicated agent portals for issue resolution have access to all necessary information in one view, and can leverage AI to deliver recommended solutions immediately. A dedicated portal for Major Incident Management enables swift resolution by bringing together the right resolution teams and stakeholders to restore services.

Visibility and transparency

Employees can easily contact IT support to track and fix issues. They can connect with IT through web or mobile to have a better understanding of the status of their incidents from start to finish, and subsequent effects.

A better consumer experience is delivered through intuitive omni-channel self-service and transparent, two-way communications.

Higher level of service quality

Agents have the ability to prioritize incidents based on established processes, which can also assist in the continuity of business processes, brought together to manage work and collaborate using a single planform for IT processes.

Likewise, incident management makes it possible to restore services fast by bringing together the right agents to manage work and collaborate using a single platform for IT processes. IT can use advanced machine learning and data models to automatically categorize and assign incidents, learning from patterns in historical data.

More insight into service quality

Incidents can be logged away into incident management software, which provides insight into service time, severity of the incident, and whether or not there is a constant type of incident that can be mitigated. From here, the software can generate reports for visibility and analysis.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Incident management systems help build out processes that provide insight into SLA and whether or not they are being met.

Prevention of incidents

Once incidents are identified and mitigated, knowledge of those incidents and necessary responses can be applied to future incidents for faster resolution or all-around prevention.

Increase incident deflection rate by reducing tickets and call volumes using self-service portals and ServiceNow chatbots—employees are able to find answers on their own before needing to log an incident, effectively preventing issues before they impact users with AIOps.

Improved mean time to resolution (MTTR)

The average amount of time to resolution decreases when there are documented processes and data from past incidents. Accelerate incident resolution with machine learning and contextual help to eliminate bottlenecks. AIOps integration reduces incidents and mean time to resolution (MTTR) to eliminate noise, prioritize, and remediate.

Reduction or elimination of downtime

Incidents cause downtime, which can slow or prevent businesses from executing operations and services. Well-documented incident management processes help in the reduction or total elimination of downtime that occurs as a result of an incident.

Improved customer and employee experience

Smooth operations within a company are reflected in a product or service. Customers will have a better experience if businesses do not experience downtime or a lapse in services due to an incident.

Likewise, providing omnichannel options, where employees can submit incidents through self-service portals, chatbots, email, phone, or mobile, empowers them to easily contact support to track and fix issues with incident management.

What are the steps to incident management?

Incident logging

An incident is identified and recorded in user reports and using solution analyses—once identified, the incident is logged and categorized. This is important for how future incidents can be handled and for prioritization of incidents.

Notification & escalation

The timing of this step may vary from incident to incident depending on the categorization of the incident. Smaller incidents may also be logged and acknowledged without triggering an official alert. Escalation occurs when an incident triggers an alert, and the proper procedures are performed by the individual who is assigned to manage the alert.

Incident classification

Incidents need to be classified into the proper category and subcategory in order to be easily identified and addressed. Typically, classification happens automatically when the right fields are set up for classification, prioritization is assigned based on the classification, and reports are quickly generated.

Incident prioritization

The proper priority can have a direct impact on the SLA of an incident response, ensuring that business-critical issues are addressed on time and neither customers nor employees experience any lapse in service.

Investigation and diagnosis

The IT team performs an analysis and provides a solution to the employee once an incident is raised. If a resolution is not immediately available, the incident is escalated to the proper teams for further investigation and diagnosis of the incident.

Incident resolution and closure

An IT team is meant to resolve incidents using the proper prioritization methods as quickly as possible. Communication can help with the resolution and closure of tickets, with the possibility of automation to help resolving tickets. Once an incident is resolved, there is further logging and understanding of how to prevent the incident from occurring again or decrease the time to resolution.

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