IT incident management: 10 reasons why your incidents aren’t resolved fast enough

Is your IT Incident Management Process Optimized?

Seemingly every other day we read about a significant IT outage, or worse, a data breach, that brings an organization to a crawl. The consistent thread through many of these situations is not only ineffective communication, but also inadequate planning, preparedness and technology. In other words, IT incidents are responded to, and resolved, much too slowly. Applying communication best practices and technology to your IT incident management processes and workflows can help mitigate this.

If this sounds like a challenge that your organization is still working through, then our new whitepaper, 10 REASONS WHY YOUR IT INCIDENTS AREN’T RESOLVED FASTER, may ring a few bells for you. 

To an organization, the speed at which information is delivered, recognized and analyzed is critical to success in effectively mitigating the impact of an IT incident. In order to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), your IT team will need to absorb information faster, escalate the incident and collaborate effectively. Here is a sneak peak at some of the 10 reasons why your IT incident management process may be slowing you down– any of these sound familiar?

• You have inefficient workflows between disparate systems and point solutions
• Your communications are limited to email and SMS
• You have no easy way to escalate issues to the right team
• Your team is overwhelmed with alerts and ignore/miss the important ones

If so, the whitepaper also walks through steps to ensure you instill IT incident management best practices and the right IT incident management communication solution to combat these issues. For instance:

• You have inefficient workflows between disparate systems and point solutions
• Why This Occurs – Systems do not have the ability to integrate or the organization has not committed the resources needed to implement integration.
• Solution – When the system monitoring and ticketing process involves managing disparate solutions, manual efforts must be made to proactively communicate information. Multiple logins and manual data entry creates extra workflow steps that decrease efficiency. The goal should be to have your systems integrated, so that when a problem occurs, the right information and resources needed to fix an issue are easily accessible and automatically communicated to the correct teams, customers and stakeholders. An alerting or communication platform that is integrated with your monitoring and ITSM platforms, as well as your on-call schedules, can help facilitate this and ensure information flows efficiently. To address organizational pushback, a cost/benefit analysis that equates the time wasted on logins and copying data into multiple areas into a dollar amount can also help make the business case to secure resources for these integration projects.

To reduce MTTR, you need to get proactive, and ensure responsibility across your organization–but having the right ITSM incident management solution in place is just as critical.