Incidents are a pain, but where do you feel it the most? Your expertise is requested!

[Kate Clavet]

Hi Community!

I’m writing because I want to hear from you. We recently conducted our annual State of Incident Management report which surveys 500 employees working in dev and IT about their incident management processes. While proactivity has gone up since the previous survey, respondents cited 3 major pain points. Lack of full visibility across IT Infrastructure, poor coordination across departments, and lack of full context during an incident.

Where it “hurts”
Which is where you all come in. While I’m not surprised by these pain points—they’re kind of what I call the “evergreen problems of incident management” I want to know if you face these same pain points, or other ones, and what are you doing to shrink the gap in your organization?

It goes without saying that incident management is essential.
While in most cases(depending on what sort of product we support) IT Incident responders may not be saving lives… they are saving companies, protecting revenue, saving jobs, and keeping customers happy. All that being said though, the happiness and comfort of Incident Responders and managers matters too. Which brings me to my next point…

Turnover is high, can we do something about it?
Average rate of turnover in the tech industry is between 13.2-18.3% (the highest turnover of any sector) and when it comes to Incident Responders that number is even higher. According to IBM Security’s Incident Responder Study ~2/3 of responders say they have sought mental health assistance after responding to a cybersecurity incident.

[Action Required] Share your perspective!
In summary here’s what I love to know.

• Do the above pain points align with your experience?

• If not, what pain points are you struggling with?

• How do you find balance after a long on-call shift?

• How does your org approach continuous improvement of your incident management process?

Feel free to share on any of the above points! I’m hoping by having this discussion and sharing some insights we can help each other to lessen some of these pain points and also lessen the mental load of being an incident responder.