Role-specific critical success factors in incident management : case energy management system company

Abstract

The main goal of the thesis is to find out the Critical Success Factors (CSF) for the roles involved in the Incident Management Process (IMP). As Incident Management is often among the first IT service management processes that organizations implement, more understanding on the process is needed. The thesis approaches the subject based on the roles involved in the process. To define the subject matter, the emerging branch of services science is presented based on literature along with the concepts of IT service management and Service Level Agreements (SLA). The presentation of IMP is based on the IT service management frameworks of ITIL and CobiT. Even though the frameworks have increased in popularity, there is still only a limited amount of scientific research on them. This thesis consists of two separate presentations of role-specific CSFs for IMP. The first presentation is a collection of CFSs derived from the frameworks with some additions from existing scientific research. The second presentation is based on interviews with employees working in the roles of IMP at a case study company, an energy management system company. The CSFs of the two presentations are quite similar when they are compared to each other. However, for some of the CSFs in the second presentation, the interviewees gave more specific definitions as they related to the case study company.