Incident Management and its importance

ITIL Incident Management

According to ITIL terminology Incident is described

as an unplanned interruption.
Incident management as the name suggest is the
process accountable for managing the lifecycle of all
incidents. Incidents can be identified by technical
staff, reported and detected by event monitoring
tools, communications from users (usually through
a telephone call to the service desk), or reported by
third-party suppliers and partners.
 Purpose

Purpose of incident management is to

reinstate normal service operation as fast as
possible and mitigate the negative impact on
business operations, thus making sure that
agreed levels of service quality are
maintained. An operational state where CIs
and services are performing within their
agreed service and operational levels is called
as Normal service operation
 Objectives

Main objectives of incident management process are as

under:
Make sure that standardized procedures and methods are
used for prompt and efficient response, documentation,
analysis, reporting of incidents and ongoing management
Communication and visibility of incidents should be improved.
Improve business perception of IT with the help of a
professional approach so that incidents will be resolved and
reported quickly
Line up incident management activities and priorities them
accordingly
Enhance and maintain the user satisfaction without losing the
quality of IT services
 Scope
Incident management includes any event
which disrupts, or something which is capable
of causing a disruption to the service. This
includes events which are communicated
directly by users, through an interface from
event management to incident management
tools or either through the service desk.
 Value of incident management:

Ability to mitigate the risk of unplanned costs and

labor for both the business and IT support staff
caused by incidents
Ability to resolve and detect incidents which in
turn results in lower downtime to the business,
which means increased availability of the service.
Ability to line up IT activity to real-time business
priorities
Ability to identify the potential areas of
improvements.
 Policies

Incidents and their status must be reported

timely and effectively.
Incidents resolution should be within the
TIMEFRAMES ACCEPTABLE TO BUSINESS.
Maintaining Customer satisfaction is very
important.
Incident handling and processing should be in
line with overall service levels and objectives
 Principles and Basic concepts

There are some basic things that need to be taken care of

when considering incident management.
Timescales
Timescales should be agreed upon for all incident handling
stages, based upon the overall incident response and the
resolution targets within SLAs
Incident models
Many incidents are not new; there are some incidents
which happen recurrently. For this reason, many
organizations find it very helpful to predefine standard
incident models, so that they can be referred at times when
needed and apply them according to incidents when they
occur.
 Policies(cont..)

All incidents should be managed and stored in

a single management system.
All incidents should subscribe to a standard
classification schema which is consistent
across the business enterprise.
All Incident records should be audited on
regular intervals to ensure that entries are
categorized correctly