Overview on Request Fulfillment / Incident Management / Problem Management / Knowledge Management

Managing support is one of the key aspects in the IT organization. Business processes always look towards the IT team for solutions as well as support for them to work smoothly. For the IT team it is very important to understand all the various aspects of support which include Incident, problem, knowledge management and service request fulfillment.  Incident and problem are often used interchangeably by business and also by IT teams. Incident as commonly defined is a “Degradation in Service”. It may also be interesting to look at what is the difference between incident and service request fulfillment. Service requests are not degradation in service. They are (as the name suggests) request for some service and in some cases could even be standard changes. For example a user request to reset his / her password is only a request. The application to which the access is sought is up and running only one user needs to have the password reset as they probably forgot what it was!! On the other hand if the user password is correct and he is still not able to log in it is classified as an incident.

So then what would be a problem? Problems in layman terms would be an incident that impacts many users or could have serious implications on business process. In the same example, in case the application is not available to many users it would be classified as a problem.

That brings us to the next point on why do we need to distinguish between the processes at all.  The answer lies in the objective / activities of each process. The main objective of incident management is to restore service as soon as possible. So in this case the answer may be to provide a temporary access to the user in order to ensure that business is not impacted. The key objective is to basically ensure that there is no degradation of service and user impact is minimal. The objective of problem management is to find a more long term solution and to prevent problems from reoccurring in the future. Taking our same example, a proper root cause analysis would be done in order to ensure that incidents don’t become problems and next time this problems occurs a fix is readily available. Key activities in problem management also include proactively managing problems. This would involve review of the incidents on a periodic basis, trying to establish trends and identify incidents that could become problems in the future. Problem management also involves conducting review of major problems. This means that any major problem needs to be highlighted and the fix for the same needs to be reviewed in order to ensure that this does not impact the working of business in the future. This also introduces the concept of a KEDB (Known Error Data Base). A KEDB is nothing but a repository of all knows problems, the root cause analysis of why the problem occurred and what was done in order to fix the issue. As is obvious this helps in the turnaround time for closing problems and keeps impact to a minimal.

ITIL V3 also introduces the process of knowledge management. The aim of this process is to ensure that all organizational knowledge is gathered stored analyzed and shared. This helps in increasing efficiency and basically saves the trouble of reinventing the wheel.

Having defined the three, companies also need to take a realistic look at what all processes they want to implement. This would depend upon the size / complexity of the business and the dependency of business on IT. For a small firm a simple helpdesk would suffice wherein all tickets can be treated as incidents. However in today’s day and age where third party services are procured in plenty it would be a wise decision to track all of these separately. Business would want to know what the number of service requests raised was and what were the incidents the users had to face. This may help in measuring if the vendor SLA’s in terms of uptime, response to requests etc were adhered to by the third part providing the service. Problem Management also plays a vital role in curbing any serious impact to business (through proactive review of incidents) and in reducing the turnaround time to resolve problems (through the KEDB). Hence companies need to be clear on what the business wants from the IT team before proceeding with the implementation of the process.

Manage Support by Manage IT provides ITIL processes which help organizations in managing their key IT risks.

About Author:

Amol Bhembre is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at amol.b@spluspl.com