A case study on improvement of incident investigation process

Abstract

IT service trending of root causes of service incidents and problems is an important part of proactive problem management and service improvement. This exploratory case study focuses on exploring human errors as root causes in IT service incidents. In the case study, we applied Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) analyzing 65 incidents to related IT services, like servers, network, storage, and applications. Based on the analysis, several improvement suggestions were identified in IT service management processes of case organizations, including improvements in incident investigation process, coupling incident investigation to continual service improvement, and need for an HFACS taxonomy adapted to IT service management (ITSM), which helps in identifying trends in incidents.