What Changed?
In Visible Ops under “Modify First Response” we discussed integrating reported and detected Change records to the Incident Management. Right now, we’ll just assume the Service Desk is performing Incident Management to keep things simple.
To review, the goal of Incident Management is to restore service as quickly as possible in order to minimize impacts to the business. One key performance indicator of this activity is Mean Time to Recover (MTTR). By harnessing the power of an integrated configuration management database (CMDB) tool, the system can help empower the service desk agents.
The CMDB should look up the configuration item(CI), which could be a service, hardware, software, and so on, and then identify all CIs that comprise, or are involved with, the CI the Incident record is about. This allows the service desk person to see that Service X is comprised of the LAN Segments 1 and 2, Network Switches 33 & 34, Application Server 22 and Database Servers 101 and 201.
Because the most frequent cause of problems is the combination of change and human error. Once the Incident record is open, sufficiently filled out for the system to look up relationships and match against existing Incidents, problems and known errors by the software, it should look up any change records and sort them for each CI in descending order because the very next question from the service desk agent, or person handing the Incident, should be “What changed?” and the software should have that information immediately available.
Having the system present the service desk and others performing Incident Management with the available relevant change data can dramatically shorten the MTTR by arming the people with the ability to answer the question of “What changed?”