Ashford Global IT
1800 Pembrook Dr. Suite 300
Orlando, Florida 32810
Toll Free: (888) 838-5498
Local: (407) 612-6999
Incident Management: Routing You Towards Success
Incident Management concentrates on restoring normal service operations as quickly as possible in order to minimize the impact to customers, users, and the business. It prepares the organization to deal with any issue that may occur including service disruptions and interruptions. These issues are communicated directly by users and technical staff as well as spotted and reported by monitoring tools. The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to ensure that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.
Benefits of the Incident Management process include:
- The ability to spot and resolve Incidents, which creates less downtime for the business, which also results in a higher availability of the service.
- The ability to line up IT activity with business priorities. Incident Management has the capability to identify business priorities and distribute resources to meet those priorities.
- The ability to identify potential improvements to services.
Activities in the Incident Management process include:
- Incident Identification: Incidents cannot be resolved until it is known that an Incident has an occurred.
- Incident Logging: All relevant information regarding an Incident must be logged in order to create a full historical record.
- Incident Categorization: This is where the Incident Management team figures out what type of Incident the issue is (e.g., whether it is hardware, software, security-related, etc).
- Incident Prioritization: Every Incident must have a prioritization code, which will determine how the support staff will handle the Incident.
- Initial Diagnosis: The Service Desk representative will attempt to uncover the full details of the Incident to determine what went wrong and how to correct it.
- Incident Escalation: Once it is known that the Service Desk is unable to resolve the Incident within the target time, the Incident must be escalated for further support.
- Investigation and Diagnosis: All of the support teams involved with handling the Incident will examine and analyze what happened.
- Resolution and Recovery: Once a potential resolution has been discovered, it must be applied and tested.
- Incident Closure: The Service Desk will verify with the user that the Incident has been resolved and the user is satisfied.
Throughout all these activities, the Incident Record must be updated with each action taken in order to maintain a full history. Having a full history of the Incident will help Service Desk personnel and the support staff restore operations as quickly as possible if the Incident occurs again.
To learn more about how Incident Management can improve your service operations, contact Ashford Global IT today!
