Strengthening Service Management by Comprehensive Analysis of Incidents

The complexity of the information systems (business applications and infrastructure) that support business enterprises has been increasing year on year, and in accordance with this the difficulty of operating and maintaining them has also been increasing. Daily incidents need to be dealt with in the places where these systems are operated, and there are not many projects for which the overall tendencies of those incidents can be determined, and the stage of solving their root cause or making proposals for improvement is seldom reached. To support the smooth operation of business, the Advanced Portfolio Management (APM) Competency Department in Fujitsu (as of December 21, 2009) has established a technique for comprehensive incident analysis, such as those incidents arising from inquiries and messages from the infrastructure and applications, from the perspectives of service management, users, and business operations. This technique targets busy fields in the operation and maintenance process and is composed of a service and templates that ease the burden placed on service managers in terms of time and effort, helping them find overall tendencies and root causes. This paper describes the technique for comprehensive incident analysis, and examines the effects of that technique by looking at actual examples.