ITSM Incident Management + the Need for Speed

ITSM Incident Management

ITSM incident management might seem like a lot of words and letters thrown together. However, when examined in the light of managing changes to IT functionality, you quickly realize their importance. ITSM incident management quickly become realized as a way to define how teams should organize themselves and operate their IT services. And key to an effective understanding of this structure is ensuring rapid resolution of IT issues.

Before going further though, let’s give a bit of definition to these key points of conversation: ITSM and incident management.

What is ITSM Incident Management?

ITSM (IT Service Management) refers to the entirety of activities that are performed by an organization to control the IT services offered to customers. ITSM refers to the shift from managing IT as stacks of individual components to focusing on delivering end-to-end services defined by SLAs and best practices. ITSM provides a process approach towards managing customers’ needs for IT services rather than a systems approach.

Incident management is a part of the ITSM area. As part of ITSM, incident management looks to provide a process approach for resolving an IT event. As opposed to trying to resolve the issue by calling team members on a roster and hoping someone answers a cry for help, ITSM incident management looks at providing a definitive process that rapidly classifies and directs incidents to the team that can most quickly resolve the issue.

ITSM Incident Management Hasn’t Been Overthrown by DevOps

It is important to recognize that DevOps has not pushed ITSM incident management over the edge and kissed it goodbye. Indeed, ITSM incident management still provides a framework for implementing change and DevOps provides a method by which to ensure people adopt the change. In a world where IT teams are often focused on DevOps, the adoption of ITSM can become the foundation for adopting initiatives such as DevOps.

What is sometimes missed as technologists move from ITSM incident management to DevOps and back again is the need for key elements from both. DevOps is much more than just automated development; it involves collaboration and a blame-free culture. At the same time, ITSM shouldn’t be seen as an administrative burden, but rather used in an agile way to manage services.

And when we talk about agile, it is important we are focusing on rapid creation of outcomes. Indeed speed is often what defeats a project from achieving success.

The Importance of Speed in Achieving ITSM Incident Management Goals

Speed is of the utmost importance when you want to ensure effective incident management. In order to quickly recognize and resolve issues, IT teams must have the ability to quickly learn about the incident that are affecting technology. The focus on framework provided by ITSM incident management does not do away with this need.

Really what needs to happen is that IT teams need tools that rapidly alert them to incidents. Tools like OnPage’s incident management platform enable teams to quickly learn about critical events impacting the overall level of service.

Without speed, companies are left back in the era of waterfall technology. And who wants to return to that level of service.