Incident management is really critical as far as all of the 10 service management practices that we're going to discuss. Because this is where the users interact with the IT department. This is where we use the internet practice at the service desk, where phone calls are logged, and email tickets are logged. This practice is about minimizing the negative impact that an issue can have on a user and to restore service to them as quickly as possible. That is actually part of the standard definition, that users want to get back up and running as quick as possible. We want to reduce any negative impact that an issue could have on them working normally. What is the definition of an incident? An incident is an unplanned interruption to a service, or the reduction in the quality of a service. All incidents need to be logged, categorize, and prioritized so that they can be resolved quickly, so the user can get back up and running. Sometimes incidents have to respond to service level agreements and there are time frames associated with how fast an incident or issue is restored, so the user can get back up and working again. We never want to see our users experience any issues or any downtime. It's almost like the user calls the service desk because email is slow. But email is not actually down, it's just really slow. That means we have to respond to it so that users can get back up and running, and we don't want the users to be negatively impacted. Incidents can be logged and categorized for many reasons; issues with software, hardware, security issues. So the service desk, they have to be trained on how to properly categorize an incident. An incident could be considered a major incident just by the user that's calling. They could be a VIP, they could be a senior executive and they're at a town, and their laptop isn't working, and they need to get back up and running quickly just by their title. Incident management is extremely critical to making sure that users are satisfied when they're relying on our IT services. Now that we know the name of the practice that we use at the service desk is called incident management. There's an additional technique that the technicians use as well when there are resolving incident issue tickets. That technique is called swarming. Swarming is when we get together with a group of subject matter experts and share best practices, and try to resolve tickets as quickly as possible by collaborating. In some cases, if the service desk technician cannot resolve the issue on their own, they will route and escalate the troubled ticket to a more experienced, functional, specialized team. This incident ticket is looked at by the appropriate team and that way they can resolve it in a quicker manner. These are ad hoc teams. They don't normally exist, they gather around depending on the issue. Who's logging the ticket, how bad the issue is. We get together a group of folks and we call that practice swarming, because the stakeholders involved have the best knowledge to resolve that particular incident. We know that tickets are logged at the service desk using the incident management practice. But, in addition to following the incident management practice, we also need some type of tool, some type of trouble ticketing tool we can log our tickets. Most cases tickets are not logged manually. They go in some type of application, and that way we can go back and look at those tickets for historical analysis, and look at a summary of what type of tickets came in, on what day, for what issues, and how we can look at various patterns to resolving tickets. Using automation eventually to see if there is some type of incident matching that we can use, it's a knowledge management database. That means if we've seen a ticket before, the tool can identify this is a repeat issue, it can match it up to a previous known resolution and the ticket can be resolved quicker. Service desk technicians at the service desk, using the incident management process, they receive calls about issues and they also receive tickets or calls about questions, and those calls are called service requests. The service desk technicians log two types of tickets. Real issues where a service is delayed or the quality of the service is being adversely affected. They also log questions and service requests for just some type of information that a user needs, or some type of functionality question in general.
