Incident Management

Service Management incident management is a crucial process for businesses as it helps reinstate normal service operations quickly after an incident, thus mitigating the negative impact of the incident on business operations, service availability and delivery. Service Management helps maintain agreed service levels with your clients.

Service Management supports the following incident management process steps:

• Detection and Notification: The first step of the incident management process includes the detection and subsequent notification of the incident across the organization. IT teams identify incidents through manual detection, solution analyses or user reports. Notifications are then sent to the respective teams in the company.
• Logging and Prioritization: Once detected, the incident is logged, investigated and categorized based on criticality. Categorization helps determine the method by which an incident should be handled and the prioritization of response resources.
• Investigation and Diagnosis: After the incident task has been assigned to the concerned teams, the members can kick-start the investigation of the cause, type and potential solutions for the incident. Once the incident has been diagnosed, the team can determine the remediation steps, including notifying the relevant clients, authorities or staff about the security incidents and informing them of any expected service interruption.
• Resolution and Closure: At this stage, the incident management team successfully eliminates the root causes of the issue or threats and restores the systems to full capacity. This step might be carried out in multiple stages depending on the type and severity of the incident. Resolution is followed by closing incidents wherein documentation is finalized and the resolution steps are evaluated. The closure step helps identify any areas of improvement and involves the implementation of proactive measures to prevent future incidents.
• Analysis and monitoring: The last step of the incident management process involves an in-depth analysis of what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again by means of constant monitoring of systems and processes.

Proper implementation of Service Management incident management would yield the following benefits:

• Helps minimize the business impact of incidents and increase effectiveness by timely resolution
• Enables proactive identification of beneficial system amendments and enhancements
• Improves proactive monitoring, thus enabling accurate measurement of performance against SLAs
• Promotes dissemination of information on different asp ects of service quality
• Enables better utilization of staff that in turn leads to greater efficiency
• Enhances client and user satisfaction