Why Should You Care About Incident Management?

Even though 63% of companies close more than 1,000 incidents per month, over 40% acknowledge IT resources are stretched too thin.

If your company experiences an IT outage today, could your IT department resolve it before customers are affected? Incidents happen all the time, unplanned interruptions or marked reduction in service quality resulting from some sort of system failure. The cause of the incident may be instantly apparent, and your IT department can address it immediately. Yet some incidents such as a broken piece of technology that has not yet impacted service to your customers may require further investigation and action.

The incident management process of IT managed services tracks that incident from beginning to end, going one step further to mitigate escalating incidents as they occur. Once identified, your incident is assigned a priority based on urgency and the impact on your business. Incidents that cannot be resolved quickly are assigned to your tech specialists who establish a work-around or resolution before an emergency, crisis or disaster is imminent. The process restores your company’s defined service levels to normal with as little disruption, as soon as possible, while analyzing the data generated from the incident to minimize any negative business impact.

Foundational Incident Management

Incident management is often a process that organizations try to adopt early when implementing an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework for aligning IT services with the needs of business. That’s because the data tracked from the incident management process is the foundation for you to plan, implement and measure transformative business operations, becoming the baseline for other service management processes, such as:

• knowledge management, to ensure your service desk and engineers have the right information to resolve incidents as quickly as possible
• problem management, to eliminate incidents altogether
• major incident management, to mitigate incidents at the highest level of severity and priority

You will apply the foundation data from incident management to create a better service environment for your company’s workforce.

Why Should You Care About Incident Management?

“It’s all about efficiency and accuracy in that foundation data load and it cannot be underestimated,” says Brenda Lichtenberg, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Portfolio. “Spending quality time collecting accurate information and understanding how the data  will be used, will directly related to ensuring all incidents and especially ones that are critical get fixed quickly and accurately so you do not have a cost impact directly to your bottom line. It really is a game-changer for your business.”

The incident management data provides your IT department analytic data that they can share with their business leaders to optimize IT services with company goals.

“Unlike incident handling, where the right person installs the right USB drive or downloads the right update or replaces the right widget to resolve one issue, incident management is a holistic process that gives you knowledge, transparency and insight into your entire business environment. ,” says Jack Mansfield, Vice President of Digital Workplace Strategy and host of the Bell Techlogix podcast, Transformative IT Service Management.

Taking advantage of incident data will help you and your business:

• Find areas of efficiency, look for potential redundancies and make your operation run smoother
• Correlate knowledge more closely with incident and business metrics to comprehend the business cost of downtime, productivity, revenue generation and profitability
• Analyze ROI and help justify plans for investment
• Prepare for automation solutions that reduce cost, increase efficiency and provide great value to your end users as well as to your service desk
• Determine the need for automated technology tools
• Architect intelligent self-service portals
• Create self-healing tools that interact with your users proactively
• identify repetitive deterministic incidents that an intelligent agent can resolve quickly and easily

Want to continue the conversation? Take a listen to episode one of the all-new Bell Techlogix podcast, Transformative IT Service Management.

Bell Techlogix. Deliver. Transform. Exceed.

Bell Techlogix is a leader in comprehensive IT managed services, providing Next Generation Digital Workplace and Infrastructure Management solutions to large and mid-market enterprises. We deliver a true client partnership and an enhanced digital experience with custom solutions that build, integrate and support the next wave of operational transformation. With our strong heritage of leveraging an “always available,” globally capable, domestic delivery model coupled with a flexible approach to project and consultative services, you receive dedicated, mission critical 24×7 service that exceeds your business expectations.