What is the main purpose of incident management in IT service management?

The main purpose of incident management in IT service management is to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible while minimizing impact on the business. This process is critical because incidents can disrupt business operations, leading to downtime and potential financial losses. Effective incident management aims to resolve issues promptly and efficiently to ensure that services are restored with minimal disruption to the end-users and overall business operations.

By prioritizing the quick restoration of services, incident management helps organizations maintain service continuity, meet their service level agreements (SLAs), and ensure that users can perform their tasks without significant interruptions. This focus on rapid recovery aligns with the overarching goal of providing reliable IT services that support the organization's objectives.

While analyzing and documenting incidents, informing clients about ongoing service disruptions, and implementing new security protocols are important aspects of IT service management, they are secondary to the primary goal of quickly restoring operations and minimizing negative impacts on the business. These activities can support incident management but do not define its core purpose.