Visibility and Performance of IT Incident Handling: A Control Theory Perspective

In industrial settings, multiple service teams are often involved in handling incidents, so these service teams come to depend on one another. We hypothesize that the knowledge these service teams have of the agreed upon and realized incident handling performance of themselves and other service teams will impact their performance. We tested this hypothesis at a large financial institute, using log data from the IT service management tool and a survey to measure the knowledge of service teams. We found a significant positive correlation between incident handling performance of a service team and the knowledge a service team has of its own performance. We found no correlation between the knowledge of agreed upon performance and realized performance within a service team. Finally, we found that teams have very little knowledge of agreed upon or realized performance of other service teams. The results suggest that increasing performance visibility within and across teams is one way to help improve performance.