The typical service desk receives hundreds or even thousands of incident notifications during the course of a year. Managing this onslaught of notifications and ensuring that each incident is resolved in a timely manner based on the needs of the business can be a daunting task.
IT service availability is the single most important responsibility of an IT organization. Once an IT service is operational in the live environment, and the business grows dependent on it, it is imperative that the service is available when needed. In the event of a service disruption, it is the responsibility of incident management to restore the service as quickly as possible. Incident management is critical to the availability of IT services.
Before delving into how to assign incident priorities, let's review some key terms:
In most organizations, the process owner of incident management is the manger of the service desk. When an incident is reported, the first step in the process is to evaluate the situation and, based on established business requirements, assign a priority to the incident. This may seem straightforward, but setting priorities is an activity that requires agreements across the organization as well as within specific organizational units.
For example, if a major incident occurs causing widespread disruption, it is understood that all resources are directed to address the service disruption. As a result, the resolution of minor incidents may be delayed. But, when there are a number of minor or major incidents, directing the application of resources becomes a challenge.
IT service priorities are defined by business priorities. Thinking of it another way, the IT strategy is created once the business strategy is completed. So before you can set an IT service priority, the organization must prioritize its business
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services. You determine a service priority based on the impact the incident causes and the business urgency to restore the IT service to normal operating levels. The formula is Priority = Impact + Urgency.
The service-level management process collects and records the business priorities for each IT service. If the number-one priority of the business is customer service, then the customer call center is a critical business service. The IT services that support the customer call center would be classified as a high priority. There are also priorities unique to each specific segment of the organization, and a priority must be established for each one of these IT services.
IT service priorities are recorded in the service-level agreements and made known to the business units and to the service desk. Prioritizations specific to a business unit would be recorded in that unit's service-level agreement. Priorities across the organization may be recorded in each SLA or published in a common area, such as the organization's internal Web site. This ensures that all parties are aware of the prioritization scheme used to restore IT services.
When all of this is in place, the service desk can assign a priority to an incident knowing that IT resources are restoring IT services that benefit the organization the most. With so many incidents recorded each day, having priorities set in advance can help the service desk do its job better. When the service desk is more efficient, everyone wins.
Stuart D. Galup is an associate professor of computer information systems at Florida Atlantic University. He is a Certified Computing Professional and is certified in ITIL. He has held a number of senior information technology positions and holds a U.S. patent. Galup has written more than 45 academic publications and two books.
