Incident Management

Incident Management is the ITIL process concerned with the rapid resolution of faults (incidents) in IT services. An incident is any unplanned interruption to or reduction in the quality of an IT service (e.g. system outage, error message, performance problem). The aim of Incident Management is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and thereby minimize the impact on the business.

This includes steps such as recording the incident (e.g. via the Service Desk), analysis and diagnosis (identifying the cause), and resolving it or escalating it to a higher support level if necessary. Effective Incident Management reduces downtime and productivity losses, improves service quality and increases user satisfaction. Categorizing and prioritizing incidents is also important: critical incidents with high business impact must be dealt with immediately, while less urgent cases are handled with lower priority.

Incident Management works closely with Problem Management – resolved incidents are analyzed in order to find permanent solutions for underlying problems. Suitable ITSM software helps to manage such processes centrally and document them traceably.

See also: Escalation Management.