What Is an IT Incident?

• IT Incident Definition

  IT Incident Definition

  IT incident refers to an unexpected event that disrupts business operational processes or reduces the quality of a service.
• What is IT incident management?

  What is IT incident management?

  Incident management refers to the practice of managing IT services causing disruption. It also involves restoring the services to their normal state without affecting SLAs. The process starts when the end user reports an issue and ends when it gets resolved via quick IT service response or action. The major benefits of incident management include proactive identification and prevention of major incidents, improved productivity, consistent service levels, heightened visibility of known issues, and more. Incident management helps you mitigate damages and prevent future incidents and can enable businesses to meet compliance and regulatory standards.
• How does the incident management process work?

  How does the incident management process work?

  The incident management process is a structured approach that helps organizations identify, prioritize, and resolve incidents to minimize their impact on business operations and customer satisfaction. When implementing incident management, consider including the following incident workflow processes:

  • Incident identification: The first step in the incident management process is to report the identified incident. Identification of incidents can be done using user logs and solution analysis. IT teams need to capture complete information about the incident to speed up the recovery process. Support teams must set up relevant channels for end users to report issues easily.
  • Incident classification: Once incidents are identified, the next step is to classify or segment them with appropriate categories, so it’s easier to assign the right group of tickets to the relevant support teams. Correct classification of incidents helps teams resolve issues faster. Predefined templates used to prioritize and classify tickets save valuable time in the process.
  • Incident notification and escalation: As soon as incidents are detected and classified, incident alerts and notifications are sent to respective IT support teams to resolve the issues. Escalations may be enacted based on the categorization or prioritization of incidents and are assigned to the relevant team or agent to respond and take further actions.
  • Investigation and diagnosis: Once the incident is assigned, IT teams perform investigations and analyses to resolve the issue. Escalation may be a necessary step to determine the appropriate remediation steps.
  • Resolution and recovery: Resolution and recovery of the incident involve identifying the root cause of the issue, eliminating the threat, and restoring systems or the services to normal service operation.
  • Incident closure: The final step in the incident management process is to close an incident. It involves documenting, reporting, and evaluating steps taken to resolve the incident. Evaluation of the steps allows teams to identify improvement areas to prevent future issues by taking proactive measures.
• Incident management roles and responsibilities

  Incident management roles and responsibilities

  Although every organization can have its custom roles and responsibilities, outlined below are the most common IT incident management roles:

  • End user: The end user is the stakeholder who experiences issues or disruptions in services and logs the incident, inciting the incident management process.
  • Service desk: The service desk is usually the first point of contact and can be divided into tiers for support based on skill sets and expertise. These tiers may range from technicians who resolve common queries in an IT environment such as password resets to technicians with more advanced knowledge of the environment who aid in resolving complex problems.
  • Service desk managers: The incident manager manages the entire incident management process of the organization and adopts ITIL best practices. The responsibilities of a service desk manager may include:
    • Defining incident management practices
    • Adhering to processes and meeting SLAs
    • Coordinating with other IT teams
    • Handling escalation issues
    • Generating periodic reports and maintaining KPIs
• Incident management best practices

  Incident management best practices

  Help minimize service disruptions by streamlining how you approach incident management with common best practices, such as having:

  • Effective communication strategy: Effective communication is one of the best incident management practices. Sending relevant notifications helps end users check the status of tickets in real time. You can follow effective strategies to trigger alerts and notifications for quick responses, tickets, and status updates.
  • Omnichannel, accessible incident intake: Offering multiple channels to end users for ticket creation such as email, phone calls, or a self-service portal. Incident logging becomes quick and effective with a multi-channel IT service desk. IT teams can also create custom IT incident forms for effective information gathering.
  • Clear, motivational team goals: Setting clear goals based on ticket parameters like a priority and SLAs can improve employee productivity and help them deliver quality services.
  • Automated incident management tasks: Automate manual tasks to save time and efficiency. Auto-assign incident tickets based on algorithms like load balancing, associate IT asset data, and IT problems with incident tickets. You can also automate email notifications, provide role-based access, configure end-user communication processes with relevant IT incidents, and create and maintain a knowledge base to streamline tasks.
• What are the benefits of implementing ITIL incident management?

  What are the benefits of implementing ITIL incident management?

  Per ITIL, incident management practices are intended to reduce the impact of incidents by restoring services as quickly as possible. When practicing incident management, it’s critical to scope the various types or categories of incidents, how they’ll be prioritized, and how they’ll be managed and mitigated within your IT service management (ITSM) platform.

  Businesses adopt ITIL incident management to streamline processes, identify incidents, improve service efficiency, and enhance employee productivity. ITIL offers guidance around incident management to minimize the potential negative impacts to ensure smooth business operations. Common ITIL incident management activities include:

  • Detecting incident details
  • Matching incidents against known problems
  • Resolving incidents quickly
  • Prioritizing incidents in terms of impact and urgency
  • Escalating incidents to relevant teams to ensure timely resolution

  Managing incidents within your ITSM platform helps you:

  • Maintain and meet service levels: Logging incidents and having defined practices for incident triage helps you meet business-specific SLAs. Incident management lends itself to the user experience, potentially impacting users’ perception of the service desk and service providers. Defining and refining incident management as needed can help service providers meet availability requirements while maintaining user productivity and service availability.
  • Improve user satisfaction: Service disruptions due to incidents can affect user experience and satisfaction. Incident management helps log issues or service disruptions in a timely and streamlined manner to expedite a resolution.
  • Increasing employee efficiency and productivity: Incident management is a great way to prevent incidents from disrupting your critical services. This not only streamlines the workflow but also saves time and efficiency of employees, making them more productive.
• How to classify IT incidents

  How to classify IT incidents

  Incidents can be classified based on their impact on both end users and businesses, as well we their subject matter and urgency. Classification of incidents helps agents triage and route incidents to relevant teams for faster response and resolution. Using incident management software, your service agents can save time and be more efficient.
• What is a major IT incident?

  What is a major IT incident?

  A major IT incident can be defined as the high-impact incident that can cause a serious interruption to business activities, services, and a large number of end users. These major incidents must be resolved with utmost urgency.
• Incident vs. problem

  Incident vs. problem

  While an incident is an unplanned event that disrupts business services, a problem refers to the potential cause of one or more incidents. Problem management refers to preventing and reducing the impact of incidents. Problems are the causes of incidents, requiring investigation into the root causes to develop workarounds and long-term resolutions, whereas incident management addresses incidents as efficiently as possible to resume normal business operations.