Incident manegment process at Catholic University of America Essay

Incident manegment process at Catholic University of America - Essay Example This could include the use of a service desk which acts as a link between the end users and the technical staff diagnosing the incident. The service desk updates the users on the progress of issue being resolved. Incident Management Cycle Incident life cycle involves discovery and listing, grouping and preliminary intervention, inspection and analysis, solution and revival, incident closure, incident ownership, follow up and evaluation, tracking and communication. To avoid IT business disruptions as a result of system failures, it is important to plan and implement programs to optimize IT service management. This begins with the analysis and alignment of the current and future business requirements and appropriate IT services provided. More serious incidents must be given precedence/priority where there are a number of incidents to be dealt with at the same time, where the user must be consulted and reference made to the Service Level Agreement (SLA). To prioritize, urgency and impac t of the incident to the user and the business must be evaluated (Office of Government Commerce 31). An incident that may not be resolved by first line support staff should be escalated to more expertise or authority. This could be either functional (horizontal) or Hierarchical (vertical) escalation. 1. Listing of Accepted Incidents Any section of the IT infrastructure may cause incidents to happen including computer operations, networking, service desk itself, procedures etc but these are usually reported by users. Detection systems can however be used to trap events taking place with the IT infrastructure. Incident management is related to other processes such as configuration management, problem management, change management, service level management, availability management, and capacity management (Office of Government Commerce 33). 2. Incident Grouping and Preliminary Intervention This involves grouping the incidents in some identified criteria. Services related to the inciden t are identified with due regard to the SLA. A support group is selected if support staff cannot resolve the incident issue; a support group is determined as part of functional escalation and based on incident categorization. An aspect of timelines here is critical involving informing the affected business user about the estimated amount of time expected to resolve the issue, with due updates on progress also provided. Incidents are also matched to determine whether similar ones occurred previously, thus helping on diagnosis and solution turnaround. 3. Solution and Revival Following an incident resolution, a record is made in the system for a Request for Change (RFC) submission to change management where necessary or/and appropriate. The RFC should usually lead to a solution (Office of Government Commerce 35). 4. Closure With a solution in place, the incident is routed back to the service desk by the support group. Service desk then informs the user to check if indeed the incident h as been resolved thereby closing the incident and incident record updated to show final category and priority, affected users and components which have been identified as causes of the incident. If user is not comfortable with the solution, the process can be reinitiated at the appropriate stage. 5. Incident Monitoring and Evaluation Service desk