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7.5.2 Incident Management
Chapter 7 ■ Service Operations
Incident management is the most popular ITIL process, from the perspective of the
number of jobs the process creates. Quite naturally, most ITIL professionals are aware of
the principles that the process lives by.
In addition, the process runs the longest, and with maximum touch points with
various stakeholders in the service lifecycle. The incident management process is
primarily responsible for the customer satisfaction and the agility with which service
interruptions are handled.
I have worked a number of years in the incident management process area, some as
an incident manager and mostly as the incident management process owner. The process
is lively and you always end up learning something new every time a new situation comes
up. You cannot get bored with the process, as every situation is different, and even in two
similar situations, the potential responses could vary. It is also the process that has kept
me up all night on certain days and has kept the senior management of the customer
organization at the edge of their seats throughout.
If you need to be exact about the incident management process, you can state that it is
a reactive process with no pro-active side to it. And I would agree. It reacts to situations, and
its efficiency depends on how quickly and efficiently the service outage is managed. The
customer does not get upset if there are service outages, but the customer would definitely
employ some disgruntled tactics when the restoration goes beyond the expectations set. I
will discuss service interruptions and the expectations surrounding them in the next section.
7.5.2.1 What Is an Incident?
You are quite well aware what a service is at this junction. If a service such as e-mail,
Internet, or voicemail faces an outage, if the end users cannot use the IT services, this
situation is referred to as an incident. The ITIL service operations publication defines an
incident in this way:
An incident is an unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in
the quality of an IT service or a failure of a CI that has not yet impacted
an IT service (for example, failure of one disk from a mirror set).
The IT service that the customer uses or enjoys comes with certain specifications
and parameters. A classic example could be that Internet service will be available at
100MBps speed with certain ping rates.
• Let’s say that the Internet stops working. Then an incident is
required to be raised.
• Let’s say the speed of the Internet drops to 55MBps, then there is
degradation in the quality of service, so an incident is required to
be raised.
• Let’s say that the Internet is being offered through a specific router
that has an automatic failover mechanism in place, and if one of
the routers fail but does not cause an interruption to the service,
an incident is still required to be raised.
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