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1 Incident Management

INCIDENT MANAGEMENTA Practical Approach to Adoption


INTRODUCTIONAs an IT help desk or service desk manager, you’re committed to providing responsive, high-quality services to your users. However, if you’re like many IT help desk managers, this isn’t easy – keeping your IT help desk running smoothly is a daily challenge.


The problem is that traditional IT help desk environments aren’t designed for the sheer scale of modern IT, and they can’t respond to rapidly expanding user expectations. IT help desk tools are largely manual, and standalone ticketing software doesn’t directly engage users. Because of this, IT help desk managers are left struggling with a torrent of user demands, without the visibility and control they need to respond effectively to their organization’s most important business needs.


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To overcome these challenges, IT organizations are adopting ITIL-based incident management. The vast majority of large enterprises already use incident management, usually as part of a broader IT Service Management (ITSM) environment.

However, incident management isn’t just for large enterprises. Ever-increasing numbers of small and medium-sized companies – some with little as 500 employees – have successfully adopted incident management.

If you’re considering incident management as a way forward for your IT help desk, you probably have a lot of questions. Exactly what is incident management? What problems does it solve? How is it different from what I do today? Is it easy to implement?

This guide will help you find the answers.


IN OTHER WORDS, YOU’RE NOT ALONE.


2 3Are you using disconnected tools without any well-defined processes?

Are you inundated with phone calls and walk-ups?

Do you struggle to understand how your IT help desk is performing?

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS THAT YOU NEED INCIDENT MANAGEMENT?To decide whether incident management is right for your IT help desk, ask yourself three simple questions.


Are you using disconnected tools without any well-defined processes?

WHAT ARE THE SIGNS THAT YOU NEED INCIDENT MANAGEMENT?

When your information is spread over ticketing systems, emails, spreadsheets, and basic desktop management tools, there’s no way to get control. You can’t create end-to-end processes, and you can’t get the visibility you need to respond efficiently and accurately to your users. This makes your IT help desk unproductive and leads to frequent mistakes. And, there’s no way to identify and escalate things that go wrong, creating lots of “lost” issues and delays for your users.

To decide whether incident management is right for your IT help desk, ask yourself three simple questions.


2Are you inundated with phone calls and walk-ups?


If you are, it’s probably creating an enormous drain on your IT help desk. Rather than actually resolving users’ issues, you spend most of your time coping with constant interruptions. It’s also difficult to prioritize issues, since the last caller – or the one who shouts loudest – gets all of the attention. This creates delays for other users, resulting in huge dissatisfaction.


3Do you struggle to understand how your IT help desk is performing?


With multiple tools, emails and spreadsheets, there’s no one place you can go for information. You probably spend days collecting and analyzing information manually, struggling with complicated third-party reporting tools that aren’t integrated into your IT help desk environment. Even with all this effort, you and your team don’t have real-time information – just an out-of-date snapshot of what happened in the past. This makes it incredibly difficult to identify issues and act on them, let alone drive continuous improvement. Creating reports for your executives is also a huge challenge – you know that you’re delivering value, but showing it is next to impossible.


IF YOU ANSWERED YES TO ANY OF THESE QUESTIONS, THEN YOU NEED TO SERIOUSLY

CONSIDER INCIDENT MANAGEMENT.


If you’re new to ITIL, incident management may sound very similar to ticketing. However, an incident management system is much more than a ticketing tool. The clue is in the word “management." An incident management system engages your users, and manages all of the processes that surround incidents – giving you complete visibility and control.

What Is Incident Management?


Ask yourself this. What could you accomplish with a system that:

Has a mobile-friendly self-service portal where users can easily raise incidents

Automatically routes each incident to the right person or team, based on configurable criteria such as the type of incident, equipment or software

Prioritizes incidents based on business impact, and drives them through the entire resolution process

Gives your team powerful collaboration tools, so they can share information and work together to solve challenging issues

Escalates when an incident isn’t being resolved quickly enough, so you can get things back on track

Shows users the real-time status of their incidents, and instantly notifies them about status changes

Provides social tools such as chat, as well as social Q&A forums where your team – and other users – answer users’ questions


It starts with a self-service portal that’s as easy to use as Amazon or eBay, giving non-technical users an intuitive way to raise incidents, make requests and track their status. This dramatically reduces time-consuming phone calls, walk-ups and emails—freeing your team’s time to actually fix issues, rather than focus on the squeaky wheel.

Then, it automates your end-to-end IT help desk processes, so that you handle incidents consistently and accurately—without any issues going missing.

Automates End-to-End IT

Example:

If your first-line support can’t

resolve an incident, the system

can transfer the incident to the

right second-line resource.


Finally, it gives you total visibility of your IT help desk. You'll be able to:

Create reports at the

push of a button, so

that you can show

executives and

department managers

exactly how your IT help

desk is performing –

and the value that you

are delivering.

Give your team real-

time dashboards,

ensuring that they

work on the most

important issues for

your organization.

Monitor detailed

performance metrics

and trends, broken

down by time to close,

category, severity and

other factors.

Drill down into underlying

incident records to

find the root cause of

performance issues.


It’s a common misperception that incident management is complicated and expensive. It isn’t. Incident management gives you a common sense, easily understood set of processes that transform the way your IT help desk operates. Many ServiceNow customers have implemented incident management by themselves, often in just a few weeks – and without the need for professional services. To bring your team up to speed quickly, ServiceNow also offers comprehensive, easily digested education on incident management, as well as a wide range of other related ITIL process areas that build on this core foundation.

If you choose ServiceNow incident management, you’ll also benefit from a fully cloud-based solution. The ServiceNow platform runs in a highly available, redundant enterprise cloud where you’ll have your own secure instance. There’s no need to install, maintain or upgrade hardware and software, and you can seamlessly evolve from incident management to IT service management simply by turning on new platform features.

Incident Management Isn't Difficult


Incident management isn’t just a standalone tool – it’s part of a platform that you can easily expand when you’re ready. By adopting other high-value ITIL capabilities, you can transform your incident management system into a fully-fledged IT Service Management (ITSM) solution.

Here are two easy ways to get started:

The First Step on Your ITSM Journey

Asset Tracking and Discovery

Do you struggle to keep track of your users’ laptops – or the servers they use? Asset tracking and discovery is the solution. You’ll be able to track all of your IT assets automatically – including software and licenses. And, because everything runs on a single platform, you can automatically enrich incidents with asset information – for example, the make, model, serial number and OS version of a user’s laptop. There’s no need to ask users for asset information or to search through outdated spreadsheets, so you’ll resolve incidents more efficiently and accurately. Similarly, when an asset fails, you’ll know who’s affected – so you can respond quickly when it’s important, and avoid a fire drill when there is no major business impact.

Problem Management

Some types of incidents happen again and again, creating a constant drain on your resources. For instance, a VPN client might fail on 50 different laptops. You’ll end up with 50 different incidents, but there’s probably only one underlying issue. Problem management groups similar incidents into a single problem, and then manages the problem resolution process. You’ll fix the problem once and it won’t come back – for example, by rolling out a global VPN client upgrade. You can also analyze historical incidents to uncover hidden problems, such as laptop models with high failure rates.


You can add other capabilities over time. These include:Once You've Started Your ITSM Journey Change Management

With change management, you’ll make changes more quickly and accurately – and you’ll avoid change-related outages. It drives the entire change process, including change requests and reviews, approvals, change validation and more. And, because your ITSM platform already tracks assets, it knows who’s affected by each change – so you can notify them in advance and identify optimal change windows.

Service Catalog

By adding a service catalog to your self-service portal, you can easily offer users other IT services – such as hardware requests, password resets, account creation, and even complete employee onboarding services. As users request more and more IT services online, you’ll reduce disruptive phone calls and emails even further – and you’ll increase user satisfaction. You can even automate approval processes – for example, when an employee requests access to a corporate database, your ITSM platform can automatically ask their manager for approval.

Orchestration

When a user requests an IT service, someone needs to fulfill that request – for example, by updating a directory or resetting a password. Rather than wasting your valuable resources on these repetitive, time-consuming tasks, you can automate these activities using orchestration. Orchestration interacts directly with your IT infrastructure, replacing error-prone manual activities with automated, accurate machine-to-machine processes. You’ll save huge amounts of effort, and your users will see results in seconds – not hours.

Knowledge Management

When users want to find out IT information – such as how to order new equipment or install new software – they probably call or email your IT help desk. There’s a better way. By putting useful articles online, you can empower your users and reduce the load on your IT help desk staff. You can easily add a knowledge base to your self-service portal, where users can search for the information they need. You’ll also be able to analyze what your users are looking for, so you can add relevant new articles to address their most frequent questions.


Let's Recap

Traditional IT help desk environments were never meant for the demands of today’s dynamic, service-centric IT landscape. They rely on standalone tools and manual activities, making it incredibly difficult to engage effectively with users, and to drive consistent, manageable IT help desk processes.

Inciden t management modernizes and transforms your IT help desk, dramatically increasing efficiency while improving service levels. It gives your users an intuitive way of engaging online, automates your processes, and gives you real-time visibility of help desk performance.

Incident management is part of an easily deployed platform that you can evolve into a full ITSM solution when you’re ready. By adding high-value capabilities such as asset discovery, problem management, change management, service catalog, orchestration, and knowledge management, you’ll continue to reap benefits far into the future.


© 2016 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved.

ServiceNow believes information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. This publication could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. The information is subject to change without notice. Changes are periodically added to the information herein; these changes will be incorporated in new editions of the publication. ServiceNow may make improvements and/or changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described in this publication at any time. Reproduction of this publication without prior written permission is forbidden. The information in this publication is provided “as is.” ServiceNow makes no representations or warranties of any kind, with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. ServiceNow and the ServiceNow logo are registered trademarks of ServiceNow. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

To find out more about how incident management can give you total visibility and control of your IT help desk, visit us at www.servicenow.com/itsm-journey.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow is changing the way people work. By placing a service-oriented lens on the activities, tasks and processes that make up day-to-day work life, we help the modern enterprise operate faster and be more scalable than ever before. As the enterprise cloud company, ServiceNow provides a service model that defines, structures and automates the flow of work, removing email and spreadsheets from the process to streamline the delivery of services.

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http://www.servicenow.com/itsm-journey

incident management - servicenow · pdf file4 incident management itil ... prone manual...

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