Tom, OK, I am going to get myself into some trouble here, but I just cannot resist. And it is lunchtime so I'm supposed to have a few minutes...
I assume you are talking about Incidents as in the ICS or Incident Command System model and standard. For all you out there who ask, what is ICS? It is a set of procedures and processes that have been defined to respond to Incidents. Now, to avoid confusion of terms, the term Incident in this set of processes is not what you are thinking. It is not "a server is throwing errors" or "there is a network storm" or "a disc drive is full". An Incident is -- The building is on fire -- An earthquake (tornado/supply your own disaster) just hit I mean, we are talking an INCIDENT here. There are people with roles -- Incident Commander, Press Relations, .... There are procedures for handover between people when they are "going off shift". There may be 100s or 1000s of tasks to manage and track. Escalations are very different if someone doesn't respond. You are talking 1 to 2 minutes before something escalates to the next person if the first person doesn't respond (and then anyone in the chain can respond and they have it and others are notified to never mind). You have tasks with things like shut off the gas with details like where wrenches are and attachments with blueprints to show where the gas valve is located. You have the need for repeatitive task groups -- like you may have a set of tasks that you do to "evacuate a classroom at a school" and you want to run that set of tasks "for each classroom" all in parallel. All with tracking and management and a consolidated view of status and what has been done and what is pending. You need to throw new tasks into the mix at a moments notice and have it fit into the mix of everything going on. Oh, and you need to be able to test things so you need a "simulation mode" so you can run drills -- and with that you have automated tasks in the mix that you need to be able to mark to "not really run, but pretend you did the step" IF in simulation mode but do the real thing if this is a real INCIDENT. (when is the last time you "simulated" an IT Incident and the response to it????) OK, so this is a little different than an IT Incident we are all familiar with. With all this, no, this is not the sweet spot for ITSM. Could you use aspects of things to try and manage smaller situations? Sure. But, there are many aspects of the overall process that are not covered. Now, I am not aware of a product on the market that helps with this. There are a number that are oriented toward helping you write a disaster response plan (and that is important) but nothing to help you "run a disaster response". 10 years ago, a lot of work was done to research this area and we actually built a product that did all of the above. It was called the Crisis Response System. It is an AR System application that was written to follow the ICS response model and allow you to encode a response to your disaster plans and to manage the response. The tasking subsystem of ITSM was a subset extracted from this product. Unfortunately, this application is no longer offered. We got good response to the capabilities from customers but they came back with "can you help us write our disaster plan" as the request. They were struggling to get it written and to have a response plan at all much less automating the response. We got good feedback that the tool solved the response problem, but they struggled (and still do) with what actually are the steps and what should the do. A couple of copies of this are out there -- someone reading this note may be one of the customers who have the solution. This is the type of solution you are looking for if you are looking for an ICS Incident response system. It was a cool application that did many things that were very advanced with the system 10 years ago. Most of which would hold up today -- although I would probably replace the form and fields that were used to show the people and assigned responsibilities with a DVF plugin that was a bit more dynamic than showing/hiding fields as one example of a change. So, can this type of thing be done with the system -- ABSOLUTELY and it has been done before. This is a specialized process that is quite different from a standard ITSM process in many ways and so deserves a separate process to fully do it justice. Now, maybe you are looking for something that is a bit less than "earthquake" or "building on fire" type incidents or something a bit less than the full ICS model response and then it is a matter of what are you looking at and what level of features and capabilities are needed to model your process. Then, what portions of ITSM most closely match the model and can they fit within the vision without warping the system too dramatically. Anyway, I have discussed my pet application enough for today. I still have a fondness for this application and what it was able to do and how quickly it was constructed with a very focused staff. Oh well, lunch is over, back to your normal programming..... Doug Mueller -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Tom Siegel Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 9:30 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Implementing FEMA incident procedure in Remedy ITSM Hi - All We are moving from BMC SDE to Remedy ITSM and I had a question. In my company's world the word "incident" has a whole different meaning than the ITIL help desk world. When we "declare and incident" folks gather into a room and follow the FEMA incident management protocol for resolving the issue. In SDE this meant replacing every instance of the word "incident" with the word "ticket", to avoid confusion. We then tracked our FEMA style incidents in the White Board module. I was hoping that there was someone out there in the Remedy ITSM world who has integrated FEMA type incidents into their system. Being brand new to Remedy, the only path that I can see is to highjack the Problem module for our FEMA type incidents and use the Incident module for our "tickets" as we did in SDE. Thanks, Tom _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
