Defining Requirements for an Incident Management System: A Case Study

An incident management process is performed by the service desk that acts as contact point to the users and customers. The service desk records each incident (a failure report or a service request) reported by a user or a customer in the incident management system. Many IT organizations are interested in establishing an incident management system (IMS) that is compliant with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management framework. In this study, we aim to answer the research question is: what types of requirements should be taken account in building an incident management system. Lessons learned from a tool specification project in healthcare domain are presented. An effective IMS should be capable of handling incidents, service requests, problems and requests for change (RFCs); enable relating several incidents and RFCs to one problem; have a public known error database; and contain information on service level agreements.