Value to business. Incident Management includes any event which disrupts, or which could disrupt, a service

Scope

Incident Management includes any event which disrupts, or which could disrupt, a service. This includes events which are communicated directly by users, either through the Service Desk or through an interface from Event Management to Incident Management tools.

Incidents can also be reported and/or logged by technical staff (if, for example, they notice something untoward with a hardware or network component they may report or log an incident and refer it to the Service Desk). This does not mean, however, that all events are incidents. Many classes of events are not related to disruptions at all, but are indicators of normal operation or are simply informational (see section 4.1).

Although both incidents and service request s are reported to the Service Desk, this does not mean that they are the same. Service requests do not represent a disruption to agreed service, but are a way of meeting the customer ’s needs and may be addressing an agreed target in an SLA. Service requests are dealt with by the Request Fulfilment process (see section 4.3).

The value of Incident Management includes:

• The ability to detect and resolve incidents which results in lower downtime to the business, which in turn means higher availability of the service. This means that the business is able to exploit the functionality of the service as designed.
• The ability to align IT activity to real-time business priorities. This is because Incident Management includes the capability to identify business priorities and dynamically allocate resource s as necessary.
• The ability to identify potential improvements to services. This happens as a result of understanding what constitutes an incident and also from being in contact with the activities of business operational staff.
• The Service Desk can, during its handling of incidents, identify additional service or training requirement s found in IT or the business.

Incident Management is highly visible to the business, and it is therefore easier to demonstrate its value than most areas in Service Operation. For this reason, Incident Management is often one of the first processes to be implemented in Service Management project s. The added benefit of doing this is that Incident Management can be used to highlight other areas that need attention – thereby providing a justification for expenditure on implementing other processes.

4.2.4 Policies/principles/basic concepts

There are some basic things that need to be taken into account and decided when considering Incident Management. These are covered in this section.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23