Operation layer

This layer contains entities from Incident and Problem management defined in ITIL version 3 (see oficial ITIL website, ITIL on Wikipedia). Incident priority is derived from its Impact and Urgency. Impact defines importance of the incident in terms of disruption of standard organization processes. Urgency takes into consideration necessity to solve the incident immediatelly (where incident impact may rise when not solved) or on the contrary the solution may be postponed (incident impact in some cases dies out in some cases, e.g. due to initiation of alternative organization processes). Priority that is comprising of impact and urgency categories sets the target solution time set for the given incident types and target response time (start of solving the incident).  After comparing actual times of begining the solving and resolution of particular incident with these planned values, incident can be marked as resolved in time or not.

Incident is closed by systems return in the previous state but the root cause of its origin may persist. If we identify the root cause of incidents, we create a record in the entity Problem. Repeating incidents of the same type are referred to the identified problem. This enables to identify situations that are always solved ad hoc without solving the root cause.

Another entity is Known error. It is e.g. error recognized by a software vendor, which resolution is promised in the next software version. If we found out that the cause of an incident is a known error we refer to it in the incident detail. This enables to proof necessity of an upgrade of an obsolete software version to a new one, that does not show the error.

Removing root causes of problems and their real resolution represent an ideal situation. In some cases, however, it is good, even if temporarily, to use a Workaround, solution that helps to cope with the problem manifestation.

Incidents and problems involve particular Configuration items, that are affected by them. Workaround is in contrast used for a temporary "solution" of a problem.

Based on incident or problem organization may create Service requests, if the incident or problem fails to be resolved with internal resources and service partner has to be involved.

Configuration database (CMDB) and process Configuration management are introduced also in the ObjectGears website.