Definitions

Severe technical incident#

A severe technical incident is a critical issue causing continued unacceptable business impact, requiring larger company engagement. These types of incidents are typically ones that put the business at serious risk, with a high chance of eroding customer trust, and where there is low confidence of reaching resolution in a timely manner. These incidents are technical disruptions that typically occur in high-visibility areas that create a very significant customer impact. Severe technical incidents should be a very rare occurrence in most organizations. For more details on severe incident criteria, see recommendations for declaring a severe technical incident.

Business Responders#

For the sake of clarity, this guide uses “business responder” to refer to incident responders who are

1. not a part of the technical incident call
2. acting to shift normal business operations into emergency mode
3. managing internal and external stakeholder communications

This shorthand term is meant to quickly differentiate responders on the technical incident bridge (engineers, developers, the Incident Commander, etc) and those on the business incident response bridge (the roles covered in this document).

Technical Responders#

In this document, a distinction is made between technical and non-technical responders for more easily understood context. But the reality is that plenty of technical abilities are still necessary for business responders to be effective in their roles. For the sake of clarity, this guide uses “technical responder” to mean any responder on the technical incident bridge who is not a “business responder.”