What is the purpose of Incident Management?

The purpose of Incident Management is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible following an incident while minimizing impact on the business. An incident, in ITIL terms, refers to any unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in the quality of a service. The primary focus of Incident Management is to ensure that incidents are resolved swiftly and efficiently, allowing services to continue functioning smoothly and to maintain business continuity.

By prioritizing rapid recovery from incidents, the process helps maintain user satisfaction and minimizes the potential for disruption to business operations. This process also includes logging, categorizing, prioritizing, and resolving incidents through a systematic approach that often involves escalation when necessary. The goal is clear: to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, which is essential for delivering reliable IT services.

While enhancing service continuity planning, conducting regular service audits, and designing new services are important aspects of IT service management, they fall under different processes and objectives that do not align specifically with the primary goal of Incident Management. The focus is always on restoration and efficiency in dealing with disruptions.