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The Anatomy of IT Service Incidents

Authors:
Kari Saarelainen
Marko Jäntti

Keywords: IT service management; ITIL; continual service improvement; root cause; categorization

Abstract:
An IT service is by definition “made up of a combination of information technology, people and processes”. These elements, in addition to external factors, are also the key components of IT service incidents. This paper presents an integrated model of IT service incidents. This model extends the concept of root cause also to latent, contributing conditions to an incident. Additionally, the life cycle of an incident is presented in the model. Unlike incidents and accidents in other industries, an IT service incidents has a duration. The damage caused by an incident is proportional to this duration. In our study, we show that there are events and conditions during the incident, incidents within incidents, which cause delays in service restoration. The model is validated by a case study method using 15 incident descriptions to validate both the latent factors contributing to the direct root cause as well as the life cycle of an incident. The main contribution of this study is the incident model containing latent conditions and events contributing to the direct root cause and concept of incident within incident. The model improves the traditional root cause analysis and acts as a framework in IT service incident root cause categorization.

Pages: 55 to 61

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: February 21, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4243

ISBN: 978-1-61208-451-0

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 21, 2016 to February 25, 2016