All About Incident Managements

 

What is incident management?

When important equipment of an organization is down, affecting its productivity drastically, it is an incident. What incident management does is address such situations effectively so that the affected party is back in business again. There are other kinds of sticky situations firms can find themselves in, and these IT disruptions can harm their operations and lead to their losses.

That is the reason incident management is extremely critical to the functioning of any organization across the world. If it is in place, a company can resolve glitches and, in the bargain, salvage the situation for itself and its customers.

It may be referred to by different organizations as call management, request management, or ticketing management.

What exactly is an incident?

A single event that causes one of the organization’s services to not perform as it should is known as an incident. If an incident is occurring repeatedly, ITSM tools that have the capability of using routine solutions are used to immediately fix them. Most companies give precedence to resolve incidents depending on how critical they are for their clients by determining how much it would affect them.

It is, therefore, not unusual that they get down to resolving high-priority incidents as quickly as it is possible for them. Similarly, less severe incidents are kept on hold until more serious ones are handled.

How does one  distinguish changes & problems from an incident?

While an incident impacts only one of the IT services of an organization, a change affects activities where the IT equipment of one or all departments has to be replaced. According to IT Service Management (ITSM), a problem entails frequent disruptions to an organization’s entire IT ecosystem. In such a scenario, the problem is registered in its ITSM tool, and a team commences to determine the core issue.

How is incident management related to ITIL?

As per the ITIL charter, in the stages of the Service Operation lifecycle, incident management is one of its components.  In the ITIL guidelines, it is one of the five lifecycle stages. The Service Operation agenda aims to use the solid best practices that are applied to shore up services for quick response.

Best practices for incident management

Mirat, with its longstanding experience in incident management, is one of the past masters in the incident management processes. Here, we will underline the most important ones.

Every organization must log all incidents in one tool, no matter what their criticality is and irrespective of what type of customer has launched a complaint. When it sticks to this thumb rule, the organization can keep tabs on each of its incidents so that it can hasten the fixing process. It would be better if the said organization works with fields that are regularized as per its systems. It could also automate updates of emails to reduce the time devoted.

All firms must ensure that there exist no mandatory fields lying unfilled. They should goad their partners to follow this procedure by filling out all mandatory fields very strictly. It helps them especially when they come out with reports and to resolve incidents as accurately as they can.

All organizations must ensure that they are keeping their categorizations healthily. They can eliminate categories and subcategories that certain of their customers may hardly use in their ITSM tools. It is better to use ‘Other’ options as sparsely as possible.

It is important to stick to a team that is abreast of all innovations in this field. They should make it compulsory for each of their customer service team members to adhere to the same troubleshooting processes from the moment they commence a process. It will help organizations to be certain that this organization’s service quality is consistent.

Organizations should use recognized solutions after they log incidents. They should register successful processes for incidents that recur.

The advantages of incident management

Here are some of the major advantages of using an incident management system.

It improves efficiency and, therefore, results in better outputs. When people handling the service desk stick to the tried and tested processes for tackling each incident, it leaves no room for ambiguity.  

When customers get incident management services that are intelligible and transparent, they are aware of what is transpiring as and when with the tickets raised by them.

Services provided through incident management software are guaranteed to be of quality. There is no way for your customer support executives to miss out on any tickets waiting for resolution in a mailbox. As the customer support staff has the capability of sorting out tickets depending on the level of cruciality of each one of them, the first priority is accorded to the most high-profile incidents, helping its customers to gain confidence about the reliability of its IT services.

When a company logs all incidents on its incident management platform, it acquires significant awareness through supervising and reporting.

It helps an organization honor all its service level agreements (SLAs) as the process of incident management procedures gives it more awareness about them. It allows it the opportunity to act where it is necessary.

Mirat’s core competence lies in offering top-quality IT incident management services. You can contact us if you want to use these services.

Basics to leveraging ITIL processes for an IT company

 

Basics to leveraging ITIL processes for an IT company

About ITIL

One of the most popular IT Service Management frameworks in the world, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides an organization the focus necessary and its employees a road map to promote professional change in its IT services, besides providing the makeover and maturity. With it, efficiency can be enhanced and successful service levels can be attained. A primary reason for ITIL's productivity is that it is vendor-neutral, ensures that best practices are followed and allows forming of a charter that can be easily comprehended by the management which intends to implement it. Axelos, born out of a collaboration between the British government and Capita Plc, is credited with developing the ITIL framework.

In the age of technology, technology and business are interdependent. In such a scenario, for an organization to be efficient and successful, its business goals and IT competencies must be progressive.

Relationship between ITIL and ITSM

ITIL is nothing but an existing framework of ITSM. Owing to this, the ITIL process ensures stability. While ITSM stands for what an organization must achieve, ITIL lays down the process to realize it.

ITIL lets organizations operating in the IT sector monitor, manage and provide technical services within. If implemented properly, the ITIL process assists in achieving productivity and also improves the satisfaction of the organization’s personnel.

The five stages of the ITIL V3 life cycle

The ITIL V3, which was initiated in 2011, has a lifecycle constituting 5 stages that are as follows,    

 ITIL Service Strategy

ITIL Service Design

ITIL Service Transition

ITIL Service Operation

ITIL Continual Service Improvement.

Service Strategy lays stress on identifying the strategy of an organization so that it can serve its customers well and describes the manner of achieving them. In this stage, the aim is to allow an organization to function tactically.

The focus of Service Design is to realize the Service Strategy by creating and developing new service offerings. It alternately improves the existing services of an organization.

Service Transition’s objective is to bring all its service offerings under one umbrella and to make sure they are examined before being incorporated. It also evaluates the quality of a service or a product before it is up and running.

Service Operation’s thrust is to ensure that solid best practices are being put in place to aid responsive services. Included in this stage are an organization’s incident management and its customer service offerings.

It is the mandate of Continual Service Improvement to improve the capability and productivity of the IT processes and services of an organization. This final stage of the lifecycle constantly ensures that the other four stages are enhanced.

Six rules for deploying ITIL successfully

The six strategies for successfully implementing the ITIL process are as follows.

a)    Modify certain ITIL processes wherever required

b)    Educating an organization’s personnel on ITIL procedures

c)    In addition to IT practices, deploy as per processes

d)    Encouraging change

e)    Hiring the team for a project

f)     Elaborate the ambit of the complete project

An organization’s IT employees need to be given proper training in ITIL tenets and procedures so that they understand clearly their roles and responsibilities in implementing the processes. This will improve their capabilities and productivity, satisfy customers of the organization and improve its ROI. Before this is done, an organization should identify areas where improvements are needed and begin to deploy ITIL only for the processes in those specific areas.

Although many vendors in the marketplace vie to offer software packages that comprise ITIL, they would not be applicable to all organizations. Each organization’s ITIL requirements would be unique.  It is, therefore, essential for each company to customize implementation as per its IT processes.

While deploying the ITIL framework, an organization would need to transform the methods, functions and responsibilities of its workforce. The staff should be given sufficient motivation to embrace change proactively and tweak their work responsibilities accordingly.

No matter how effective certain processes are, they are dependent on the people who carry them out. It is necessary, therefore, to hire people who are convinced about ITIL.

After analyzing the hurdles in the IT processes, an organization should strive to resolve them. It needs to assess the hardware and software requirements needed to implement the ITIL processes by coming up with a budget to implement them.

Using ITSM software to transform an organization’s service desk  

Bringing about a major change in the customer service desk of an organization can be made a reality by embracing cloud technology and developing the capability to develop software that is centralized for its customer service department.

It should incorporate incident management to keep tabs on requests from customers, to automatically allot tickets to an expert in that area and the progress achieved here should be shared via automated emails throughout the organization.

It is crucial for the organization that is implementing the ITIL initiatives to identify who is using what assets and which of them need to be replaced.

Finally, the organization needs to place a request, go to the drawing board and assess properly the entire workflow within it.

Mirat follows all the mentioned ITIL processes to the T. If your company requires help in its implementation, don’t hesitate to contact it.

 

 

Decoding NFTs

 

Decoding NFTs

NFTs, short for Non-Fungible Tokens, are digital tokens that give their owners a unique identifier. Just like cryptocurrencies, they are virtual currencies that are secured by the Ethereum blockchain, allowing people to own various types of items of arts or other collectibles. Once bought, they cannot be interchanged for any other item. Although NFTs are akin to cryptocurrencies, they are different than the latter because they can represent totally different items and could be evaluated alternately.

NFTs are unique because their files hold additional information digitally. For instance, even if they are replicated, the copied or downloaded files will not be able to store authentications that are incorporated in the original.  Owing to this very reason, NFTs are said to be empowering creators of these assets on digital platforms.  

Notable assets sold as NFTs, besides arts, collectibles, gifs, music, etc., include intangible items.  As these are available only digitally, a buyer of NFT gets only a digital file. It allows the owners to add more detailed information inside them. As stated, NFTs are available for various items, including arts, videos and games. Therefore, they are sold and bought online only using cryptocurrencies.

Introduced in 2014, they have surged in popularity, thanks to increased transactions of digital art assets. Although the assets (mostly unique and sought-after) can be accessed by others, individuals buy them to bag their copyrights in order to gain name and fame. The owners can then sell them directly to consumers, instead of exhibiting them in galleries or auctioning them off, allowing them to make more profits. Moreover, creators of these artworks will gain royalties whenever they are bought by a new owner. This would not be possible if these assets were sold physically. 

To own NFTs, one has to buy a cryptocurrency specified by the provider.  Alternately, one can use credit cards to transact on virtual platforms, like Coinbase or PayPal. The two most popular sites for NFTs are Rarible and Foundation.  

But among some bizarre items sold using NFTs are Twitter founder Jacky Dorsey’s first tweet, published originally in March 2006, and the original source code written by Tim Berner’s Lee for his invention, world wide web. They both were bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars.