The Business SME

The Technical SLT is the first business response role to get involved during an ongoing technical incident. As a member of the Senior Leadership Team, they join a technical incident call as a subject matter expert representing business needs. This role has an on-call rotation and they can be paged to join a technical incident at any time.

Incident Commanders should be trained to recognize when the severe technical incident thresholds, as defined by your organization, are close to being reached. When those thresholds are near, the Incident Commander should request that a business SME join the incident call.

When joining the technical incident call, the sole responsibility of this SME is to determine if a wider company response is warranted. They should evaluate whether the current incident meets the defined criteria for escalation to a severe technical incident. Incident severity should not be litigated during an incident. That’s to say that escalation to a severe technical incident should not be an argument to make and achieve consensus from responders on the technical incident call. The job of someone in the business SME role is to consider the defined thresholds in the context of the current technical incident and make a recommendation for escalation to the Incident Commander when they determine the thresholds have been met.

The Incident Commander has final authority over escalating the status of the incident.