Change
The addition, modification, or removal of anything that can have a direct or indirect effect on services.
Change management
The process of taking changes to completion with minimum disruptions and collisions.
Escalation
The act of transferring ownership of a ticket based on a functional or hierarchical need.
Event
An occurrence that has significance for the management of a service or asset.
Failure
An occurrence where a service or asset does not function according to the agreed SLA.
Hierarchical escalation
The act of transferring ownership vertically to a higher tier service desk technician or relevant authority.
Impact
A measure of the severity of an incident.
Incident
An unplanned interruption to an IT service, or a reduction in the quality of an IT service. Failure of a configuration item, even if it has not yet affected a service, is also an incident (e.g. failure of one disk from a mirror set).
Incident management
The process of managing the life cycle of all incidents to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible and minimize business impact.
Incident prioritization
Assigning priorities to incidents and defining what constitutes a major incident.
Major incident
An incident that has a high impact and high urgency, requiring a separate process from incident management.
Major incident manager
The person who is responsible for the MIT and the implementation of the MIM process.
Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA)
A measurement of how quickly an incident is acknowledged by the service desk.
Mean time to detect (MTTD)
A measurement of how quickly a potential threat to a service or configuration item is detected.
Mean time between failures (MTBF)
A measurement of how frequently a service or asset fails.
Mean time to repair/resolve/respond/recover (MTTR)
A measurement of how quickly a service is restored after failure.
Normal service operation
A service operation that adheres to the service level agreement (SLA).
Problem
A cause or potential cause of one or more incidents.
RACI matrix
It defines the roles and responsibilities in cross-functional or departmental projects and processes.
Service desk
The point of communication between service providers and the organization's users.
Service desk manager
The one who oversees day-to-day activities of the service desk and is responsible for its performance.
Service-level objective (SLO)
It defines the objective of the service providers, and is a means of measuring their performance.
SLA
An agreement between the service provider and the customer about the expected level of service and the expected time in which it is delivered.
Urgency
A measure of how quickly an incident needs to be resolved.
