Incident Management

Most medium sized and large companies deploy "Incident Management" systems to record errors and failures in the daily operations of their IT systems. In fact the recording of errors and deficiencies has become almost routine. Incident management has become an accepted part of information technology or information services. There is now big money to be made in providing organisations with incident management software and services. This is a big waste of money and resources because a large number of incidents should not be occurring in the first place. Incidents should be reduced to enable simple "pen and paper" administration. An incident should be a very rare exception not a regular occurrence.

I do not expect many people to agree with me, but if you have so many errors and deficiencies that you have to deploy specialised software and services, to administer them, then something is seriously wrong. There has been a failure in some or all of the following: the original definition of the business requirement, the analysis and design of the system, the design of the man machine interface, training ,education and testing. In other words you have a big quality control problem. You might also need to need at your quality assurance.

I recently read some incident management procedures which included twelve categories of errors. This is almost farcical.

Incident management systems do nothing , of course, to fix the basic problems . They do, however, divert the attention of management from resolving the real failures. Organisations become buried underneath the statistics relating to problems which should not exist in the first place. This is all a symptom of gross inefficiency.

The original promise of Data Processing or Information Technology was to improve business administration: to improve the work flow and reduce errors to a minimum or eliminate them altogether. We could then free up human resources for decision making and creative activities. This should have been achievable if we had used our brains to critically examine work processes and the methods by which we analyse , design , program and test IT solutions.

Correcting something that has gone wrong is much more expensive that doing the right thing in the first place. In other words prevention is better than cure. It is time for all organisations to do something about it.