iWise Incident Management

It is extremely difficult to describe an artistic sculpture in words rather than pictures. iWise software is a "see" rather than a "what." But we will do our best to describe it in both words and images. Below is a summary of iWise Incident Management.

iWise Incident Management provides an easy and efficient method for personnel or external applications to record incidents. An incident can be loosely defined as any abnormal event concerning data processing and distributed equipment, procedures, services, environment, voice or data networks, or other configuration items (CI). Incidents range from simple calls such as password resets to more difficult problems that pass through a series of vendors and assignments, such as application problems resulting from hardware or network errors. Through the use of Incident Management functions, such as the extraction of relational data, user-defined tables, and automation, you will be able to integrate Incident Management into your overall service management structure.

A key feature of Incident Management is the automation of various administration-related incident management tasks. This is accomplished by providing incident notification, recording incidents from external files or processes, and relating incidents to change, configuration, and product management.

Incident Management can be used to perform the following tasks:

• Easily record incidents with enterprise and distributed hardware, software, service, network, voice, and configuration items (CIs). Any out-of-the-ordinary event can be logged.
• Define a Knowledge Base of Solutions that dynamically adapts to changing environments and can be reviewed for more efficient resolution.
• Provide checklist and analysis scripts for products, services, and configuration items (CI).
• Define notification processing and escalation rules on a product, configuration item (CI), time, or impact basis.
• Obtain Service Level Agreement (SLA) measurements and recent activity per configuration item regarding incidents, changes, and requests.
• Interface with Change Management and CMDB for verification, automated level II assignment, incorporation of change defaults and approvers, and to ensure information entered is accurate.
• Develop incident reports via an ODBC reporting tool, such as Crystal Reports or SAS Reporting, among others, and distribute them on the internet or your intranet for review.
• Determine if an incident is a duplicate of one previously entered, or if it is related to a recent change.
• Check the configuration database to determine the effects of an incident on the rest of the configuration path.
• Determine if the incident being entered is caused by an incident involving a higher-level configuration item (CI).
• Attach any number of related and supporting documents and files to the incident.
• Distribute the incident information to a third-party recipient or distribution list via e-mail, fax, pager, etc.
• Generate an iWise broadcast notification to all iWise users, based on the information within the incident.
• Generate incidents from external sources such as Network and System Monitoring tools, E-Mails from individuals, customers, etc.
• Generate an iWise Solution from a resolved or closed incident.

Incidents reside in an Enterprise Information Base (EIB). You need not be aware of the format or processing of this EIB, but you must be aware of how to enter an incident and the type of data that should be entered, if Incident Management is to be effective. There are several pages involved in direct entry of an incident; however, many functions can simplify or accelerate this process, including copying an existing incident or a model incident.

Management

Management of an incident process is more than just recording when, where, how, and why an incident occurred. It also includes reviews, incident determination, timely fixes, service level analysis, and other important processes. Support for these processes is inherent and, for the most part, automatic in Incident Management and its relationship with its companion service management applications. Although these functions are automatic, you should be aware of them, since they do affect the information entered in incidents.

A key objective of Incident Management is to provide a way to manage incidents easily and efficiently. This implies that enough information is collected to support this objective. At the same time, the amount of data entry performed during initial entry must be kept to a minimum. The approach used to resolve this potential conflict is to extract administrative information whenever possible, and to present only those attributes applicable to the general area. This shifts the emphasis from everyday entry and use to initial setup and support.

The result is that less administrative information needs to be entered manually when an incident is recorded. This permits helpdesk personnel to concentrate on entering specific incident-related data rather than administrative data. This, in turn, permits key statistical data to be collected and used for later analysis.