Improving Incident Management North Wales PA

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Originally published at Internet.com

Incident management took the top spot as the most important ITIL process required for IT service delivery, according to a survey Forrester Research conducted last year.

And organizations could get a lot better at it if they focus on maintaining a dynamic repository of information about the people involved in, and affected by, the incident management process, argues AlarmPoint Systems, which makes the AlarmPoint series of enterprise-wide notification and event resolution products.

"Optimizing incident management in many ways centers around optimizing the people part of the equation," says Jayne Swystun, marketing director for AlarmPoint Systems, which has been hosting a series of incident management process optimization seminars on the East Coast this month.

In roundtable discussions with IT directors, AVPs and VPs and operations managers at its D.C. seminar last week, 90% of participants noted that they have ignored an alert to an IT problem because they assumed the event had already being assigned to, or resolved by, someone else in their organization.

The confusion is understandable. "If you think about the people associated with critical events, there's a lot of complexity in just trying to track them," Swystun says. "You have a mobile workforce, different subject matter expertise, several different types of wireless or voice communications devices to reach them on, and all have different schedules and skill sets that need to be captured per event."

Avoiding Accountability

In an earlier survey undertaken by the vendor, 13% of respondents cited poor event assignment and dispatch (often due to a breakdown in the process, poor quality of data, or lack of detection) and 13% cited human errors as issues affecting the resolution process.

Nearly 30% of respondents relied on passive "set and forget" automated email events for dispatch and resolution processes, 20% on "set and forget" duty pagers, and more than 40% on manual call-outs to dispatch IT personnel, which may not leave audit trails or may inadvertently alert the wrong person to a problem.

Eighty percent of participants at the D.C. seminar said they believed the IT staff in their organization avoids accountability. AlarmPoint's technology is designed to improve the quality of data so that the right personnel, including supervisors, are informed via any communications device, and dispatched to respond to critical events, as well as to keep from slamming certain individuals with too many service calls.

The vendor contends that many solutions companies currently use for event notification operate in a reactive, uninformed mode.

"They don't get to the intelligence of what the issue is - who should be assigned, and who at the time of the event (either part of the workgroup or the supervisor) needs to know" about the event, says Swystun.

AlarmPoint's product is also scalable for very distributed environments, Swystun says, supporting the notification process in 12 different languages. People associated with any of the issues on any of those assets could be considered a configuration item to be populated into a Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

By automating communications and interactions, the company says it helps customers reduce the time to fix critical IT events and reduce help desk, call center and dispatch organizations' costs.

Swystun cites the example of a large customer who manages R&D facilities for the government. The customer thought it would have to add more staff to keep up with what had historically been an increasing number of events, but actually wound up needing fewer service desk people than previously.

"What they found is, when they were able to really focus on managing critical events, managing exceptions, and attaching each of those events with the right people, that can solve those issues quickly, and free up a lot of time from the help desk," she notes.

That gave it the freedom to redeploy that service desk staff and put them to work on higher-skill types projects. "They found they could reassign these people to handle essentially more work without adding more staff and while providing better service," she says.

Robust tools are important, according to customers who attended the D.C. roundtable, where some of the discussion, according to AlarmPoint, focused on the need for technology that can quickly identify the exact problem and automatically notify the proper support people, and that also provides correlation wherever possible to reduce false alerts.

But so, too, they said, is a rigid process for distributing outage information which presents information in clear and understandable terms, and reduces the "nagging" of those people trying to fix the issue.