Incident triage on the ServiceNow® platform

Efficient incident management is a key factor in ensuring smooth IT operations. A structured incident triage plays a crucial role in this process.

To make incident handling as easy as possible for 2nd level support teams, incidents should already be properly prequalified by the service desk. Ideally, this ensures that the 2nd level support team has all the information it needs to resolve the issue directly—without unnecessary follow-up questions to the user (employee or customer).

A well-executed triage not only helps resolve incidents faster and meet agreed response times, but it also significantly improves the satisfaction of the service desk, the 2nd level support team, and end users.

The importance of triage for AI

Since much of today’s focus lies on artificial intelligence (AI), solid triage is particularly valuable in this context as well. AI relies on historical data—in this case, the incidents prequalified by the service desk. The better the data quality—and triage plays a key role here—the better the AI can derive accurate insights from it.

ServiceNow® Playbook and Employee Center

In many organizations, triage is still treated as an afterthought. It is either not performed at all, done in an unstructured manner, or documented in Word or Excel files that are cumbersome to complete and must then be manually attached to the incident.

Yet the Now Platform offers two components—Playbook and Employee Center—that enable structured, complete, and fully integrated incident triage.

Playbook

With Playbook, service desk agents are guided through an interactive process that walks them through all essential triage questions. This ensures that the 2nd level support team receives all the information it needs.

Employee Center

With Employee Center, it is even possible to shift parts of the triage process directly to the user. By asking the necessary triage questions during incident creation, the service desk workload is reduced and overall incident resolution time can be significantly shortened.

How these two concepts can be successfully implemented within an organization is described in detail in the two whitepapers linked below. I also outline how we can support you in implementing them in your ServiceNow® instance.