Incident management (ITSM)

Last updated

Incident management (IM) is an IT service management (ITSM) process area. [1] The first goal of the incident management process is to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. 'Normal service operation' is defined here as service operation within service-level agreement (SLA). It is one process area within the broader ITIL and ISO 20000 environment.

ISO 20000 defines the objective of Incident management (part 1, 8.2) as: To restore agreed service to the business as soon as possible or to respond to service requests. [2]

Definition

ITIL 2011 defines an incident as:

an unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in the quality of an IT service or a failure of a Configuration Item that has not yet impacted an IT service (for example failure of one disk from a mirror set). [3]

The ITIL incident management process ensures that normal service operation is restored as quickly as possible and the business impact is minimized.ITIL Service Operation. AXELOS. 30 May 2007. ISBN   978-0113310463.

Incidents, problems and known errors

The main challenges and cause for problems in the Incident management are:

  1. Constantly increasing Alert and Event Noise
  2. Complex and Lengthy IT Problem Resolution Process
  3. Inability to effectively predict and prevent IT service degradations or outages [4]

Bold text==Biblio'Bold text''''Bold text'Bold text''''graphy==

  1. "Incident management is now a necessity for the enterprise".
  2. "The BPM-D Application". Gov.UK Digital Marketplace.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. ITIL Service Operation. United Kingdom: The Stationery Office. 2011. ISBN   9780113313075.
  4. "Why automatic context enrichment for alert and incident management is critical for operations?". 3 December 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Risk management</span> Identification, evaluation and control of risks

Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Configuration management</span> Process for maintaining consistency of a product attributes with its design

Configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon systems, military vehicles, and information systems. Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business continuity planning</span> Prevention and recovery from threats that might affect a company

Business continuity may be defined as "the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at pre-defined acceptable levels following a disruptive incident", and business continuity planning is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations before and during execution of disaster recovery. Business continuity is the intended outcome of proper execution of both business continuity planning and disaster recovery.

Disaster recovery is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle. It employs policies, tools, and procedures. Disaster recovery focuses on information technology (IT) or technology systems supporting critical business functions as opposed to business continuity. This involves keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive events; it can therefore be considered a subset of business continuity. Disaster recovery assumes that the primary site is not immediately recoverable and restores data and services to a secondary site.

Information technology (IT)governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance, focused on information technology (IT) and its performance and risk management. The interest in IT governance is due to the ongoing need within organizations to focus value creation efforts on an organization's strategic objectives and to better manage the performance of those responsible for creating this value in the best interest of all stakeholders. It has evolved from The Principles of Scientific Management, Total Quality Management and ISO 9001 Quality management system.

Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.

Change management is an IT service management discipline. The objective of change management in this context is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to control IT infrastructure, in order to minimize the number and impact of any related incidents upon service. Changes in the IT infrastructure may arise reactively in response to problems or externally imposed requirements, e.g. legislative changes, or proactively from seeking improved efficiency and effectiveness or to enable or reflect business initiatives, or from programs, projects or service improvement initiatives.

ISO/IEC 20000 is the international standard for IT service management. It was developed in 2005 by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 and revised in 2011 and 2018. It was originally based on the earlier BS 15000 that was developed by BSI Group.

Capacity management's goal is to ensure that information technology resources are sufficient to meet upcoming business requirements cost-effectively. One common interpretation of capacity management is described in the ITIL framework. ITIL version 3 views capacity management as comprising three sub-processes: business capacity management, service capacity management, and component capacity management.

ITIL security management describes the structured fitting of security into an organization. ITIL security management is based on the ISO 27001 standard. "ISO/IEC 27001:2005 covers all types of organizations. ISO/IEC 27001:2005 specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving a documented Information Security Management System within the context of the organization's overall business risks. It specifies requirements for the implementation of security controls customized to the needs of individual organizations or parts thereof. ISO/IEC 27001:2005 is designed to ensure the selection of adequate and proportionate security controls that protect information assets and give confidence to interested parties."

Performance engineering encompasses the techniques applied during a systems development life cycle to ensure the non-functional requirements for performance will be met. It may be alternatively referred to as systems performance engineering within systems engineering, and software performance engineering or application performance engineering within software engineering.

A change-advisory board (CAB) delivers support to a change-management team by advising on requested changes, assisting in the assessment and prioritization of changes. This body is generally made up of IT and Business representatives that include: a change manager, user managers and groups, technical experts and, possible third parties and customers.

Production support covers the practices and disciplines of supporting the IT systems/applications which are currently being used by the end users. A production support person/team is responsible for monitoring the production servers, scheduled jobs, incident management and receiving incidents and requests from end-users, analyzing these and either responding to the end user with a solution or escalating it to the other IT teams. These teams may include developers, system engineers and database administrators.

Problem management is the process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems that happen or could happen in an IT service. The primary objectives of problem management are to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening, to eliminate recurring incidents, and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented. ITIL defines a problem as the cause of one or more incidents.

Event Management, as defined by ITIL, is the process that monitors all events that occur through the IT infrastructure. It allows for normal operation and also detects and escalates exception conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tudor IT Process Assessment</span> Process assessment framework

Tudor IT Process Assessment (TIPA) is a methodological framework for process assessment. Its first version was published in 2003 by the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor based in Luxembourg. TIPA is now a registered trademark of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). TIPA offers a structured approach to determine process capability compared to recognized best practices. TIPA also supports process improvement by providing a gap analysis and proposing improvement recommendations.

The Service Design Package (SDP) contains the core documentation of a service and is attached to its entry in the ITIL Service Portfolio.

The Service Portfolio is described in the ITIL books Service Strategy and Service Design. The Service Portfolio is the core repository for all information for all services in an organization. Each service is listed along with its current status and history. The main descriptor in the Service Portfolio is the Service Design Package (SDP).

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of detailed practices for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of the business.

ISO 22300:2021, Security and resilience – Vocabulary, is an international standard developed by ISO/TC 292 Security and resilience. This document defines terms used in security and resilience standards and includes 360 terms and definitions. This edition was published in the beginning of 2021 and replaces the second edition from 2018.