The core principle ‘Focus on value’ dictates that understanding and agreeing on the expected value, outcomes, and how they will be measured is the foundational step before any implementation work begins. This ensures the project is aligned with business needs from the outset.

The root cause is a lack of governance and basic management (ownership, procedures) for the application. The Continual Improvement practice is designed to identify such gaps and drive the changes needed to resolve underlying issues, which will reduce incident volume more effectively than just treating symptoms (like hiring staff or automating a single task).

Effective Supplier Management goes beyond financial and contractual administration. Its core purpose is to ensure suppliers and their services deliver agreed value. This requires actively managing performance through regular reviews against predefined metrics and service level agreements, which is the element missing in the described scenario.

Portfolio Management is the practice that maintains the service portfolio, which is the complete set of services under management. This portfolio includes strategic information about each service, such as its business case, value proposition, and how it supports specific business outcomes, making it the primary source for such a report.

Service Configuration Management maintains the Configuration Management System (CMS), which holds information about Configuration Items (CIs) and their relationships. The practitioner can use the CMS to identify all services, applications, and infrastructure components that handle the regulated data, providing the essential scope for the compliance assessment.

Standard, pre-approved requests for things like software installs should be handled as service requests, not incidents. The Service Request Management practice is designed for efficient, user-initiated actions with defined procedures and agreements, which would significantly reduce fulfillment time compared to using an incident workflow.

Service Continuity Management is the practice focused on ensuring a minimum agreed service availability in the event of a major disaster or disruption. It is responsible for creating the service continuity plans that define the specific actions, teams, and procedures for responding to and recovering from major incidents, which is the described scenario.

Problem Management identifies the root cause and proposes a solution (a fix). However, the implementation of that fix is a change to the live environment. The Change Enablement practice is responsible for assessing, authorizing, and scheduling all changes to ensure they are managed with appropriate control and minimal risk to live services.

ISM&P emphasizes the entire service lifecycle. Viewing ‘go-live’ as the end focuses only on the project (development) phase. This neglects the crucial ongoing stages of the service lifecycle: operating the service, delivering value to users, and continually improving it based on feedback, which poses a significant risk to long-term success.

The core principle ‘Focus on value’ dictates that understanding and agreeing on the expected value, outcomes, and how they will be measured is the foundational step before any implementation work begins. This ensures the project is aligned with business needs from the outset.0