The significant incidents happen in the companies every day such as outages, security breaches that seriously affects the productivity, customer perceptions and could result in the huge losses to the company. Hence managing the IT incidents is important to focus on the business impacts, business continuity, and growth.
While all the companies aim in avoiding all the major incidents, you and your organization should be possible to tackle and be prepared with the action plans to meet and resolve the issue proactively. Automation plays a major role in devising this strategy. Organizations that use the automation in the major incidents resolution processes achieve faster restoration of the services with less human errors. Automation impacts your ability to shrink the duration and impact window. To leverage the power of automation you should carefully examine the activities and the tasks that you need to take place during the resolution window and figure out the other activities that are either before the incident or after the incident. Here are some useful tips to help you get started.
- Define all the processes: Defining the major incident management process, what can be planned coordinated and executed during the process. This will also help you define the key support team members with the required skill set and schedule such that your service desk people can engage with them quickly and efficiently. It helps to define how you can relay the relevant information to your team so that they can resolve the issue in the first place itself. Automation is a critical key aspect for defining the business processes. For Example, you can automate the inclusion of relevant information from the monitoring tool directly to the help desk tickets. Also, you can document the entire incident to a single source that is accessible to everyone.
- Accurately measure the MTTR: Mean time to repair is a critical component and depends how you base it on the total time that IT teams are engaged and how it can impact. You can either measure the MTTR through the impact window. This helps you achieve optimized efforts while reducing the impact of incidents, and present better response reports to your board. Automation helps you providing full visibility into applications and resolve the activities and communication for analysis and audit to improve your processes.
- Collect data to help manage the support problems: restoring the service does not mean the end of the incident management. Some of the most valuable activities after providing the resolution is the data collection and performing root cause analysis. The root cause analysis helps to fully audit a major incident that includes putting the preventive measure to avoid the problem in future. Even if the incident does occur in the future, you can create a defined procedure of what kind of data you need to collect and the steps you need to follow for the resolution. This way it helps in refer to a checklist and focus on the core objective of restoring the services. Thus automation helps in capturing and preserving resolution activities, including the transcripts in a single system of record for analysis.
In the nutshell to conclude with automation is the smarter choice for the businesses but you have to more cautious that the more automation is not necessarily the better approach. It is really important to understand when, where and how you can automate your IT systems.