BUSINESS VALUE OFINCIDENTMANAGEMENT

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The value of Incident Management lies not only in resolving incidents and recovering services in the least possible time – in this paper we will have a look at the real business value of Incident Management.

Purpose of Incident ManagementIf you ever had the experience of dealing with Incident Management, you may have pursued the idea that Incident Management was only about recovering the service in the least possible time and according to the service level agreement you have with your customer. This, however, is a quite reactive approach to Incident Management and one that does not create much value for your customer. So what would create even more value for your customer?

What customers really want from you as the service provider is that the service does not go down; Recovery of the service as soon as possible is valuable, but it would be even more valuable not to have any service outage at all, or at least reduce the number of outages.

To answer that let us consider the goal of IT Service Management itself, which is to increase the value for business. Even if your service organization is not very mature ITIL-wise, you can collect valuable data from incident resolution and the real value of Incident Management lies in using that as a base for the following:

1. Reducing the number of Incidents

2. Improving the resolution time

3.Defininganimprovementplanofservice

Incident ReductionIf a CIO was asked if he wanted to save time for his experts, surely his answer would be yes. Solutions, like shortening the average duration of calls, or increasing

thenumberofcallsbeingresolvedinthefirstcontact,would contribute to this, of course, but taking measures to reduce the number of incidents is something that wouldreallymakeadifference.

If a business manager really cares about the performance of his personnel, the following should be important to him:

• In the last month, when were we performing the least?

• Inthelastmonth,howeffectivewerewe?

• What could be done so our personnel could improve their performance?

As these are questions that the business manager would often expect the CIO to answer, the CIO should use the Incident Data, data gathered when doing Incident Management, as it is valuable information for IT.

Incident Data is a valuable source of information, about what is causing the failures, and by analyzing it you can find the root cause of the incidents. Knowing the root cause of incidents is the first step towards the reduction of incidents.

As CIO, you should analyze your Incident Data to:

• Detect the relation between this data (Answering the followingfivequestions:Who?What?When?Where?What is the context?)

• Analyze the pattern of incident occurrence and findouttherelationbetweenincidents(Whyaretheincidents happening and what do they mean?)

• Categorize the incidents according to the impact they have on your business (Loss of opportunity, and loss of revenue)

Oneefficientwaytoreducethenumberofincidentsisto consult with the person(s) responsible for Problem Management and Change Management, so by root cause analysis of the problems or implementing proper Change Management, you may reduce the number of incidents, or eliminate their root issues. Not to mention that, to prioritize these issues, you need to

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interact with your business departments, which you may conduct this process using Continual Service Improvement. Once you start performing the processes mentioned above, the number of incidents will decrease dramatically, resulting in an improvement of your services.

Improvement of Resolution TimeIfyouaretryingtofixissuesthat,fromyourcustomer’sperspective,shouldnothavehappenedinthefirstplace, you certainly should have them resolved in the least amount of time – and preferably in a proactive way. Meaning, you should not wait for the incident to happen and then start resolving it, but take measures to decrease the number of incidents as much as possible. But when incidents do happen, you have to be informative about them and recover them proactively. For this, you need to know the possible symptoms of incidents, so you can predict the incident, and you can improve your resolution time of incidents. You can do this better if you use this data in the Knowledge Management process. Analyzing incidents proactively and documenting their resolution in the Knowledge Management process will help you decrease resolution time, based on the previous patterns in your service organization.

The ITSM tool that you are using for your Incident Management, should have Knowledge Management capabilities. Without Knowledge Management, your tool will be more like an issue tracker, just helping you not to missyourcustomer’scriticalissues,butnotbeingableto help you in the improvement of your resolution time.

POB Service Desk Management not only fully supports the Incident Management process, but it can also automatically convert incident resolution to knowledge. This way, whenever an incident with a known resolution or any other related knowledge topic occurs, you can use the diagnosis solutions already provided for your resolution. Therefore, you

will be taking action against the incident faster, which decreases the impact of the incident on your business.

Using a self-service portal is another way to reduce the resolution time of the incidents. Based on the knowledge that you have created before for your incident resolution, and classifying it in an Automated Troubleshooting Tree, you can assign resolution of a large portion of your incidents to the end users themselves. If they are not able to resolve the incident by themselves, you can lead them in a structured way so you will gather more precise information, helping your service desk to reduce resolution time by targeting the incident exactly according to the information provided. Self-service portals in addition to tools that can automate Incident Management processes could help you resolve more incidents quicker, and thereby have more human resources available for valuable business targets.

An Automated Troubleshooting Tree powers the POB Self Service Portal, and you can share the knowledge of your service organization with the customers. This will enable end users to help themselves.

Defining an Improvement Plan of ServiceWhen analyzing your Incident Data, you should also look for possible methods to improve your service, and thereby not only meet but perhaps even exceed customer expectations. Some items that could help you:

• What changes in the current or new service could help you increase customer satisfaction?

• Which new technologies can help your service organization decrease the number of incidents and improve the resolution time – and how?

• Can you improve your service quality by providing training to customers? Would the training cost you less than a service outage would?

• Which service features do the customers have the most questions to? Can we reduce the number

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of questions by changing our software or hardware service?

• How was the customer covering their requirements by innovative methods? Can you learn something from these for improvement of service?

• Whichworkaroundswerethecustomersusingtofixthe issues?

• Which support groups could get help from another for fixingtheissues?

• Which services could be added to your service organization to support “Why cannot I” question?

• Which customer requirements have never had any service provided at all?

• What services could the customer use, which is provided in other enterprises?

• Which question answers are among the ones “not compliant with the policy”? How can we help the customer with this?

In addition to the answers to all the above questions, any answer to “I could do it easier if…” could contribute to a plan to improve your service.

Using POB KPI Explorers it is easy to extract information gathered in different processes, and use that to define an improvement plan of your service.

Real Life...You may say that you hardly have the time for resolving incidents,howcouldyoufindthetimeforanalyzingthe data gathered through the Incident Management process?

We know how you feel, we have experienced this too. Often, service organizations are challenged by their incident resolution and do not have the time to focus on improvements.

However, you need to make a decision whether you want to react to your incidents as before, or change how you interact with your incidents by having a robust plan to improve the process; Reduce the number of

incidents, decrease the resolution time and have an improvement plan constantly on top of it.

Wendia and our toolset, POB – Point of Business, can help you target the improvement targets on Incident Management by using our implementation experience so you do not have to run trial & error for this.

In Wendia, we aim to help our customers gain the real value of Incident Management by enabling them to use Incident Data to improve their processes and services.

To summarize:

• Do not make the improvement too complex; Start with thesmallestthingfirst.Forexample,findtherootcauseofthemostcommoncallstoyourcallcenterandfixthat.

• AskyourservicedeskstafftohelpyouanalyzeyourIncident Data. As a CIO, you can always reward them for what is best for your business as a whole!

• You should always discuss the business value of Incident Management with your colleagues, and ask them to help reduce the number of incidents and not just resolve them.

• Discuss with your service organization the possible impact of the incident on customer satisfaction, and alwaysseeincidentsfromthecustomer’spointofview.

• Do not concentrate only on the traditional incident KPIs like reducing the number of calls, shortening the average duration of calls or increasing the number of incidentsthatareresolvedonthefirstcontact,butfocusalso on reducing the number of incidents and improving your services.

If you would like to have more information about Incident Management or Service Management in general, and how POB can help you to optimize your Enterprise Processes Management, please contact your local Wendia office or partner or reach us at info@wendia.com.