10 Compelling Reasons Why Invest in Incident Management Software

The COVID-19 outbreak is a unique type of emergency for global businesses. One that demands effective communication and exceptional management from senior management and stakeholders of any business. In times like this knowing how to manage the emergency from start to finish is important for both employees and business owners. But, most businesses fail to operate in a unified way in a crisis like COVID-19 due to the absence of a robust incident management software solution.  

By partnering a reliable enterprise software development company, businesses can employ a custom emergency management system to navigate through the crisis successfully.

The article will highlight the key reasons why global businesses should invest in an incident management software solution. Read on: 

In this article, we’ll cover the following topics: 

• What is an IT Incident?
• What is Incident Management? 
• Stages of Incident Management
• What is Incident Management System?
• Why Invest in Incident Management Software 
• Taking your Incident Management Practices to Next Level

What is an IT incident?

An incident refers to a disruption in day-to-day IT functioning and security activities of an enterprise. An IT incident can affect a micro-level employee to the senior-most member in a firm. Put it simply, anything that affects the business continuity is considered as an incident. 

What is Incident Management? 

Incident management is a foundational part of any company that ensures smooth business functioning without any disruption, according to the ITIL framework. ITIL stands for The Information Technology Infrastructure Library. According to ITIL philosophy, proactive systems can’t prevent incidents in an enterprise always. 

The ambit of incident management starts from a user reporting an incident to the restoring of the same level of services with by the service desk team.

Different Stages of Incident Management 

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a standard framework for incident management, followed by most global businesses. It provides a framework of best practices for delivering IT services. Incident management lifecycle is a part of this framework

ITIL’s incident management life cycle provides guidelines for IT professionals to work collaboratively to ensure effective service delivery. ITIL framework is flexible and can be structured in a way that meets the needs of your organization. 

Let’s have a closer look at each stage of the ITIL incident management lifecycle.

Stage 1: Incident logging

A user reports an incident at this stage via any communication channel like SMS, email, call, live chat or self-service portal. 

Stage 2: Incident categorization

Classification of the incident is performed based on the area of IT or business, Reasons which cause disruption in service are also identified like network, hardware etc.

Stage 3: Incident prioritization

Multiple incidents are prioritized based on the impact and urgency using the priority matrix at this stage. Based on the priority, incidents fall in the categories of Critical, High, Medium, Low.

Stage 4: Incident routing, assignment 

After the incident is categorized and prioritized, it is transferred to the IT personnel with relevant expertise. 

Stage 5: Creating and managing tasks

The incident is broken down into sub-activities or tasks. Tasks are typically created when an incident resolution requires multiple technicians with assistance from different departments. 

Stage 6: SLA management and escalation

Technicians must resolve the incident within the given SLA. Service level agreement is an acceptable time by which an incident must be resolved. If SLA is not met, the incident gets escalated in the upper hierarchy for resolution at earliest.

Stage 7: Incident resolution

An incident is considered resolved when the technician has come up with a temporary workaround or a permanent solution for the issue.

Stage 8: Incident closure

An incident can be closed once the issue is resolved and the user acknowledges the resolution and is satisfied with it.

What is Incident Management Software? 

An incident management software is a tool that helps companies automate or speed up the process of incident response or management process. It works as a virtual bridge between IT managers, employees and customers. 

When users encounter any network or service issue, they can raise tickets or complaints to get timely resolution from the members of the incident resolution team via such software. 

By having incident management software in place, you can save your IT managers from receiving ad-hoc service requests in their inbox. Overall, an incident reporting tool organizes and streamline the entire ticket-to-resolution process without putting an additional burden on managers, even with the largest IT networks.  

Key Features of Incident Management Software 

• Store critical information about incidents (e.g. severity, users affected, etc.)
• Store additional media (e.g. a screenshot) for incidents. 
• Incident prioritization
• Route incidents based on resource availability, time-zones, etc. 
• Track status (e.g. open, rejected, duplicate, deferred, closed);
• Report the statistics/metrics about incidents 
• On-call incident assistance facility for clients and employees

Why You Should Invest in Incident Management Software 

Instead of opting paper-based incident management systems, you should prefer a quality incident management system for your business. This will help you minimize the incident rate at your business. 

Here are some reasons why your business needs an incident management system today: 

• Incident Alerts 
• Incident Logging 
• Incident Classification 
• Incident Analysis & Response 
• Team Collaboration Status 
• On-Call Assistance

• Streamline & Standardize Incident Response 
• Ensure Employee and Clients Safety 
• Reduce Operational Downtime 
• Stay Better Prepared For Incidents 
• Save Valuable Time 
•  Maintain Effective Internal Business communication 
• Receive Timely Alerts During Emergencies
• Boost Business Profits 
• Improve Collaboration & Transparency 
• Faster Anomaly Detection

Let’s explore each reason in detail: 

Streamline & Standardize Incident Response 

Modern emergency incident management software is effective in streamlining and standardising emergency response activities. When using this tool for your business, you can ensure a coordinated response to business anomalies or emergencies. Standardized practices will enable your employees to better understand their duties and corresponding actions during enterprise incidents. 

Ensure Employees and Clients Safety 

Well-designed emergency management system comes with powerful data and communication tools, enabling you to respond to emergencies quicker. This helps you minimize the risk of employee, client and contractors safety. Cloud-based software for incident management provides mobile app support which employees can use anytime, anywhere to report any incident. If they observe a problem, they can immediately alert managers or incident response teams. 

Similarly, clients can inform about IT issues (e.g. server errors, downtime, etc.) faster to your company’s designated departments via an incident reporting tool. This ensures critical data is delivered faster and with minimum response times.

Reduce Operational Downtime 

Safety incident management software provides various kinds of information in a consolidated manner. This helps you analyze complex data and get a complete overview of business problems like security or operational issues. All of this information can be analyzed regularly by your incident response team to identify trends, patterns or issues related to customer service or internal operations.

Maintain Effective Internal Business communication 

Having a well-designed incident management system in place ensures effective communication at all times between internal staff. Cloud-based software is great to ensure seamless connectivity between staff. Your employees can perform accurate incident reporting anytime, anytime and from any device with a cloud-based system. Cloud services like AWS offer robust security and uninterrupted connectivity for emergency management. Senior managers can track the flow of communications and see whether the incident was escalated or resolved. This gives key personnel real-time situational awareness.

Improve Collaboration & Transparency 

Collaboration and workflow transparency is important between dedicated teams working in any organization. A quality incident management software can help you drive efficiency – no matter how you’ve set up your IT architecture and development teams. 

Partner an expert enterprise software solution provider to get a customised incident management tool for your business. This will help your IT team respond to challenges in real-time by quickly diagnosing an incident. Further up, it will add resilience to your applications and infrastructure, which isn’t something every IT team can do. 

Faster Anomaly Detection

These software solutions are designed to gather relevant, time-sensitive and accurate incident data. Luckily, IMS of today’s generation has come a long way and become more advanced. How? Modern IMS solutions come with Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning capabilities which enables them to detect a large number of metrics for anomaly detection. This is not possible manually in your business unless you hire hundreds of expert data analysts. 

With technology advancements today, companies have more data to work with than ever before. To analyze and find the data that needs your attention (like anomalies) from this large noise, a system like IMS can help your business adapt to changing conditions.

Receive Timely Alerts During Emergency Incidents 

Some of the modern IMS also serves as an emergency notification system for businesses globally. What this means is they report emergencies like fires or spill incidents in a workplace as soon as they occur. During such chaos, the incident reporting system keeps employees alert via different communication channels like email, voice or SMS. 

Boost Business Profits 

Proactive compliance, safety initiatives and employee training for businesses emergencies can cost you a lot of time and money. Placing a robust incident management software inside your business premise can save costs for you by automating the incident reporting and response practices. An enterprise-wide emergency management system backed by cutting-edge technologies will also help you increase the effectiveness of your planning and preparedness efforts. 

Save Valuable Time 

Cloud solutions are a great tool to ensure robust communication and collaborative response during incident management. Instead of using a traditional paper-based system, you can accomplish more and save your valuable time using an incident reporting tool. For example, incident reporting can be done in minutes with few easy clicks via software, compared to a paper-based reporting. 

Stay Better Prepared For Incidents 

Using incident management software enables security personnel in your business to perform their job effectively by accurately reporting critical incidents. These solutions easily tie in with other IT systems like inventory software, ERP, etc. to prevent any losses for your business.  By using quality SaaS software, you and your employees can stay better prepared to mitigate and prevent any losses. 

Taking Your Incident Management Practices to Next Level!

Relying on basic safety measures and paper-based procedures during emergencies like COVID-19 is not a good idea at all. Integrating robust incident management software solutions can maximize the effectiveness of your incident response efforts. If you are looking for assistance on how to run your business smoothly amid COVID-19  with minimal disruption, you can partner A3logics. 

We deliver customized incident management solutions that help you proactively engage your employees, ensure security & safety, and improve visibility of potential risks for your business. We can help you achieve the goal for a safe and secure workplace.

Our enterprise software solutions are trusted by more than 500+ clients globally. From SaaS-based, CRM solutions to ERP systems, we deliver customized solutions that suit all your business needs.

Contact us today for an informal discussion about your current incident management needs. We are ready to help!

A3Logics

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