Major Incident Management Communication Application

[jjarka]

One of the key components to managing a major incident is being able to communicate to all interested and affected parties.   In my past life we had a tool, home grown, that was subscription based, meaning that people subscribed to the services, or in this case CI's, that they wanted to know about.   This tool allowed me to send out communication to these parties, update them on the progress of the issues, communicate the business impact at the current moment, and provide the status at the time of the communication, i.e., open, ongoing, restored, resolved, reopened and closed.   While I see several of these components within ServiceNow I do not see an application/module for this.  

How do you do your major incident management communication today and do you know if there is an third party application that already does this?  

[Matt Benson1]

Incident Alert might be what you are looking for.

https://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Incident_Alert_Management

[jjarka]

Thank Matt, I have seen this but it doesn't do all that we need it to.  

[Uncle Rob]

Seen a few different iterations of this.   The most effective one I've ever seen was a human solution.   The IT department hired a marketing expert with an IT support background.   This person established relationships with each of the main business stakeholders and got to know how they did business and what they really cared about.   He was looped into the Major incident process and drafted all communications personally.

It worked because:

- we couldn't programatically determine interested party.

- our business stakeholders absolutely despised automated alerts

- the automated alerts had a bad habit of being so irrelevant that the relevant ones were ignored.

I still keep in touch with them, and they've now built a small team around the marketing discipline, and built a custom app to track / manage their work.

[jjarka]

Very true, I have see this work very well with the home grown solutions and we have a similar solution right now with the human solution as well.   I know that there is a better way to do this though as I have already had a tool that did a great job in communicating this.   I was hoping there was already an app out there that did this but I haven't found one.