Quality and human errors in IT service infrastructures — Human error based root causes of incidents and their categorization

Incident trend analysis is a practice where historical incident records and reports are investigated in order to identify patterns or trends in incident root causes. It is needed to prevent reoccurrence of incidents in order to improve the quality of service in ICT infrastructures. The research problem of this study is how quality of service could be improved by analysis of incidents with root causes related to human errors. Human error related root causes of IT service incidents are classified with the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) and also according to IT service management processes. 18 incident reports containing enough information to track the contributing conditions behind the harmful human act were investigated. As a result, three major types of sequences of events were identified. These event sequences describe error pathways leading to the active failure. By combining two categorization models, HFACS and ITSM processes, in a two dimensional matrix, we found that that most of the error pathways were related to change planning.