Why ITIL major incident management needs automation to stay relevant

When a major incident strikes, every second is critical. While the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a trusted framework for crisis response, its manual-centric processes are struggling to keep pace with the very technology they are meant to manage. In the face of sprawling technology ecosystems, relying on manual coordination is like trying to conduct a symphony with a single drum, it’s chaotic, inefficient, and fails to harmonize the efforts of different teams.

This friction leads to delayed responses, inconsistent communication, and exhausted engineers. The solution isn’t to abandon ITIL’s major incident management valuable structure but to supercharge it. Automation transforms rigid, manual checklists into dynamic, orchestrated workflows, allowing organizations to move beyond simply surviving incidents to mastering them.

In this article, we’ll overview the definition of ITIL major incident management,  major incident management challenges and how runbook automation software provides action-driven collaboration, coordination and visibility.  

Why traditional major incident processes are falling short

Traditional major incident management (MIM) processes, while structured, are often plagued by inefficiencies that can prolong outages and exacerbate their impact. 

These manual-centric approaches are characterized by several key challenges:

• Time-consuming communication loops: Manual communication processes are slow and prone to error. Valuable time is wasted on conference calls, emails, and instant messaging to mobilize teams and disseminate information. This leads to delays in decision-making and a lack of shared visibility among stakeholders. This problem is particularly acute for senior stakeholders who often lack a clear, real-time view of the incident's status and its business impact.

• Delayed escalation and diagnosis: Without automation, identifying and escalating incidents can be a slow and cumbersome process. This can result in critical issues not getting the immediate attention they require. In addition, manual diagnosis of complex systems can be a time-consuming and challenging task, often leading to a longer time to resolution.

• Human error during high-pressure response: In the heat of a major incident, the pressure to restore service quickly can lead to mistakes. Manual processes are particularly susceptible to human error, which can have serious consequences, such as incorrect diagnostics or failed recovery attempts. 

• Teams working in isolation with overlapping or incompatible tools: In many organizations, different teams use their own preferred tools, creating information silos and making collaboration difficult.
  
  
• Post-Incident Review Deficiencies: The work doesn't end when the service is restored. Post-mortems (or root cause analyses) often fall short of their potential. A key issue is that they fail to clearly outline the concrete, actionable steps taken for improvements in future incidents. They may document "what happened," but they often lack the crucial "what will be done differently," making it difficult to drive systemic change and prevent recurrence.

This lack of integration can lead to duplicated efforts and a fragmented view of the incident, hindering a coordinated response.

Automation is no longer optional — it’s foundational

To overcome the shortcomings of traditional MIM, automation has become a foundational element of a modern incident response strategy. By automating key aspects of ITIL for major incident management, organizations can dramatically improve their ability to respond to and resolve critical events.

Automation transforms the incident management lifecycle in several ways:

• Smart alerts trigger predefined workflows: Instead of relying on manual detection and triage, automation tools can monitor systems in real-time and automatically trigger predefined workflows when an incident is detected. This ensures that the right teams are engaged immediately and that the response process is initiated without delay.
• Pre-approved actions reduce downtime without waiting for manual input: For common and well-understood incidents, automation can execute pre-approved actions to resolve the issue without human intervention. This can significantly reduce downtime by eliminating the need to wait for manual approvals, which can be a major bottleneck in the incident response process.
• Streamlined communication and collaboration: Automation can streamline communication by providing a centralized platform for all incident-related information. This ensures that all stakeholders have access to the latest updates and that communication is consistent and accurate. 

Align ITIL with major incident management 

A common misconception is that automation is at odds with the structured and process-oriented nature of ITIL for major incident management. In reality, automation is a powerful enabler of the ITIL framework, helping organizations to adhere to its principles while moving at the speed of modern business. 

Here's how automation supports and strengthens the ITIL framework for major incident management:

• Continual improvement: Automation provides the data and insights needed to drive continual improvement, a core tenet of ITIL. By automatically capturing and analyzing incident data, organizations can identify recurring issues, track key performance indicators (KPIs) like Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), and uncover opportunities for process improvement. 

• Seamless cross-team collaboration: Automation breaks down silos and fosters seamless collaboration across teams by providing a common platform and a single source of execution for all incident-related activities. This ensures that everyone is working from the same playbook and that efforts are coordinated and aligned.

Common barriers to automation and how to overcome them

Despite the clear benefits, many organizations face challenges when it comes to implementing automation. The survey also found that while 87% of IT decision-makers are optimistic about the potential of AI to improve major incident management, there are still significant barriers to overcome. 

Here are some of the most common barriers to automation and how to address them:

• Tool complexity and integration: The proliferation of tools in the modern IT landscape can make automation a complex undertaking. Overcoming this challenge requires a strategic approach to tool selection and integration, focusing on platforms that offer open APIs and can be easily integrated with existing systems.
• Cultural resistance or fear of job displacement: The fear of job loss is a common concern when automation is introduced. It's important to address these fears head-on by communicating the benefits of automation and emphasizing that it is a tool to augment, not replace, human expertise. A survey by UiPath found that nearly 60% of respondents believe that automation can address burnout and improve job fulfillment. 
• Skills and training gaps: The skills required to implement and manage automation are in high demand. Organizations need to invest in training and development to upskill their existing workforce and ensure that they have the expertise needed to succeed with automation.
• Governance and compliance considerations: In regulated industries, ensuring that automated processes are compliant with all relevant regulations is a critical concern. This requires a strong governance framework and the use of automation platforms that provide detailed audit trails and reporting capabilities.

Real-world benefits of automation in major incident management

But, why choose a major incident management system? The benefits of automating major incident management are not just theoretical. Organizations that have embraced automation are seeing significant improvements in their ability to respond to and resolve critical events.

Here are some of the real-world benefits and metrics that have been reported:

• Reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR): By automating key aspects of the incident response process, organizations have been able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to resolve major incidents. Cutover’s recent survey on major incident management shows that 43% of organizations cite faster resolution as an improvement from automation. 
• Greater consistency in response execution: Automation ensures that processes are executed consistently and in accordance with best practices, reducing the risk of human error and improving the quality of the response. 
• Less burn-out among incident managers and on-call teams: By automating repetitive and manual tasks, organizations can reduce the workload on their incident management teams, leading to less burnout and improved job satisfaction. A recent survey found that 58% of global workers believe that automation can address burnout and improve job fulfillment

Cutover automated runbooks: Standardizing response and reducing risk

To bridge the gap between ITIL's structural guidance and the pace of modern technology operations, organizations need to move beyond manual processes. Cutover Respond streamlines and automates the entire incident management lifecycle, embedding orchestration directly into the ITIL framework.

Instead of chaotic war rooms and siloed communication, Cutover strengthens your major incident management ITIL process in several critical ways:

• Enables Rapid, Automated Mobilization: Respond eliminates the manual effort of finding and engaging the right people. It automates the mobilization of cross-functional teams with clear roles, allowing Major Incident Managers to focus on directing the response, not coordinating logistics. This drastically reduces the time to engage resolvers and begin active resolution.

• Provides Seamless Visibility with a Task-Based Model: Cutover replaces scattered chat messages with a real-time, task-based model for tracking work. This ensures every step is visible, accountable, and consistently executed, reducing the human error and missed steps that occur under pressure. It provides the operational rigor needed for complex technical procedures like system failovers and disaster recovery events.

• Reduces Toil and Accelerates Resolution with AI: By automating routine tasks and leveraging AI agents to surface actionable insights, Respond frees up resolvers to focus on high-value problem-solving. This not only increases efficiency but also augments human decision-making to help prioritize what matters most, leading to faster, safer incident resolution.

• Automates Post-Incident Review and Learning: Respond automatically captures a comprehensive, immutable audit trail of every action taken. This simplifies the creation of post-incident reports, satisfies compliance requirements with less toil, and provides the labeled data needed to learn from every incident and continuously improve.

By embedding this level of automation and visibility into your major incident management ITIL processes, you don't just manage incidents, you master them. Cutover Respond empowers your organization to meaningfully reduce MTTR, build business resilience, and respond to critical events with speed, confidence, and precision.Learn how to automate major incident management with automated runbooks - contact Cutover today.