Business driven prioritization of service incidents

Abstract

As a result of its increasing role in the enterprise, the Information Technology (IT) function is changing, morphing from a technology provider into a strategic partner. Key to this change is its ability to deliver business value by aligning and supporting the business objectives of the enterprise. IT Management frameworks such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library, [3]) provide best practices and processes that support the IT function in this transition. In this paper, we focus on one of the various cross-domain processes documented in ITIL involving the service level, incident, problem and change management processes and present a theoretical framework for the prioritization of service incidents based on their impact on the ability of IT to align with business objectives. We then describe the design of a prototype system that we have developed based on our theoretical framework and present how that solution for incident prioritization integrates with other IT management software products of the HP Openview™ management suite. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.