The increasing dependence of business on its IT infrastructure has focused the industry on adopting best practises in supporting their IT infrastructure. The internationally recognised best practices model used to guide IT organisations in developing their service management approaches (ITIL) defines a technical vocabulary for the discussion of support services. It defines clear concepts and draws distinctions between various support activities.
An incident is any event that is not part of the standard operation of a service and causes an interruption to or reduction in the quality of that service. These could include calls from a User who cannot receive e-mail, or perceives that an application is running slow to a Network Operations Centre (NOC) monitoring tool that indicates a WAN circuit may be down
Incident management refers to activities undertaken to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible while minimising adverse impact on business operations. Incident management is a reactive, short-term focus on restoring service and is responsible for the management of all Incidents from detection and recording through to resolution and closure. The objective of Incident Management is the restoration of normal service as soon as possible with minimal disruption to the business.
Incident management activities include:
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Incident Service Level Agreements & Priorities |
Incident Escalation & Alerting |
The incident workflow is defined by the organisation and then managed within the Service Desk. Workflow management has been designed around ITIL best practice. The RMS system is flexible and customisable to ensure Incidents are handled according to their nature, urgency etc.
The RMS Service Desk can be configured to capture the information relevant to any organisation's incident management process. Incidents are captured within a ‘folder' which pulls together all of the information necessary for incident management. Two examples of incident folders are shown below.
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Fields on the incident folder can be renamed, hidden or made mandatory based on customer specific requirements. The tabs can also be renamed or hidden or, with the template field, configured to capture additional information. This means the incident folder can be as simple or as complex as required. These ‘view codes' can also be configured based on groups of users and their specific requirements. This would allow for different views to be created within RMS for IT, Facilities and Estates, HR, and any other department who could benefit from a job logging system.
The RMS Service Desk is based on a comprehensive Configuration Management Database which ensures that the incident is reported against customer, asset, location, department etc. and as much information as possible is either auto-populated or defaulted. This aids speed and accuracy. With the exception of a few key fields such as description and notes all fields are look up or auto populated.
RMS also provide a number of options to facilitate and automate incident logging.
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Views of incidents are created using Worklists. Worklists are dynamic lists of logged incidents and problems that meet a specified selection criteria. They are automatically updated at regular, user specified intervals and multiple worklists can be set up to monitor different situations. Worklists are a very effective way for Service Desk operators to organise their workloads and they are just as effective as a means for the System Administrator or Service Desk Manager to monitor the whole system. Worklists can be globally generated or, depending on privilege, users can define their own selection criteria and worklists. The RMS system supports unlimited worklists.
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The above screen shot shows a user with a number worklists configured: My Work; SLA Breaches; Known Problems; and Service Status. Any incident/problem information can be shown within the worklist (right clicking on a column heading will provide the ability to add or change columns) and a double click will open the incident/problem.
Individual rows in a worklist can be coloured according to a number of criteria. This can be used to highlight critical situations or areas of responsibility, for example highlighting a priority 1 incident in red or a VIP in green. The worklists also come with the ability to do bulk updates to the incidents sub selected and pulled into the worklist.
Unlimited Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be defined within RMS. These SLA's can be assigned to a customer, an asset, an application or a third party supplier. Each SLA will be defined against a relevant working calendar (for example, Monday to Friday 08:00 to 18:00, Saturday 08:00 to 12:00 and excluding bank holidays). Up to 9 priorities can be defined within each SLA with corresponding initial, interim and resolution targets.
Each incident/problem will also have a ‘status' to ensure things are not just ‘in progress'. These statuses are customer defined and represent the lifecycle of the incident/problem and could, for example, include call logged, call acknowledged, analyst investigating, awaiting customer feedback, passed to third party supplier, call resolved, call closed and so on. The SLA clock can be stopped or started automatically on status code and incidents can be automatically progressed or escalated based on time.
A sophisticated procedure for combining SLAs, Priorities and Status Codes is used to manage the customers' requirement.
An important feature is the provision of ‘Quick Call' templates, which allow the user to select a number of different Incident scenarios, suiting a variety of circumstances. This will immediately populate all the requisite fields to define the nature of the Incident. If necessary an Incident may be logged and processed completely in a single step, obviating time consuming routine actions, whilst retaining a complete record of the transaction.
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Incident classification provides vital reporting information. Classification within RMS is configurable and up to five levels are available: Call Type; Call Code; Application; Source; Module. Each classification selection can be used to sub select at the next level.
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Incidents can be assigned either to a team or both team and team member, depending on requirements. The incident owner can also be established separately from the team member working on the fault.
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Additional features such as the skills matrix and rota/diary systems are also available to assist with assignment of issues and provide visibility of the availability of staff.
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The SLA encompasses a comprehensive alerting mechanism also controlled by the Priority, which issues multi media and multi level warnings to staff and, if required, to customers on the progress of the Incident. When the terms of the agreement are not met, or time limits are exceeded, these alerts are dispatched via Pager, SMS, Email or directly via the RMS system to the designated recipient. Provision is included to send these alerts to an alternative recipient if the principal recipient is unavailable.
This escalation against SLA and priority is also visually indicated on the incident worklists with a traffic light system that changes from green, through amber to red, as an incident approaches its final target.
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Incidents will also move through status codes as they progress to completion and RMS provides the ability to automatically advance this after a specified period, to trigger all the appropriate responses of escalation.
With supplier contracts defined within the CMDB, incidents and problems can be escalated to a third party supplier. The RMS Service Desk can be configured to ‘stop the clock' on the internal SLA and start it automatically on the supplier one. Key details from the supplier are captured and the performance of the third party supplier can be monitored and reported on through the standard reports within the application.
RMS can provide the ability to launch remote control tools. Within the Tools menu, there is the ability to automatically launch third party software. This functionality also allows you to pass parameters from call details fields. For example, you could launch remote control software passing the IP address or station name.
RMS provides a number of knowledge management solutions systems, which are linked to incident.
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