Most CIOs think they’ve nailed incident management.

They’ve got SLAs. Tickets fly through queues. Dashboards show green. The wheel keeps turning.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Being fast at fixing isn’t the same as being in control.

In many organisations, incident management is reduced to reactive box-ticking — fast on paper, but brittle in practice. And when things really go wrong, the cracks in the system show.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the messy, high-stakes world of supplier-driven service delivery.

Because today, almost every critical service relies on a supply chain of vendors, partners, and cloud providers. That means you’re only as fast and as competent as the slowest link in that chain — and in a major incident, that’s a big problem.

🔍 The Invisible Risk in Incident Management

The challenge isn’t just speed. It’s coordination, accountability, and integration. Most incident processes weren’t designed for today’s hybrid, supplier-heavy world.

Ask yourself:

• Do your suppliers follow your major incident process?

• Are SLAs aligned to what the business actually needs — or just what got signed?

• Are there defined OLAs between internal teams and third parties? Do the even add up to meet the over-arching SLA?

• What happens when your SaaS vendor blames your firewall — and your network team blames their API?

This isn’t theory. It’s what derails resolution every single day.

✅ The Good: Integrated, Accountable Incident Management

When incident management is working as a leadership tool:

• Major incidents have a clear enterprise-wide owner — not just a tech lead

• External suppliers are integrated into the process — not siloed away in their own runbooks

• SLAs and OLAs are mapped to business priorities, not contract language

• Service Owners take accountability across the entire resolution chain — internal and external

• Support hours and escalation paths are rehearsed, known, and tracked

This is what mature organisations do. They don’t just fix — they orchestrate. Because incident management isn’t just about tech, it’s about trust.

❌ The Bad: Firefighting in Silos

Here’s what poor incident management really looks like:

• Tickets bounce between your team and “the supplier’s ticketing system”

• You chase vendor support desks who close issues at 5:01pm because of time zone SLAs

• You have no idea if your cloud provider’s P1 matches your P1

• Major incidents have no central leader — just emails flying across departments

• PIRs only look at what you did — not what your supply chain failed to do

It’s chaos dressed up as coordination. And when leadership is missing, that chaos spreads — fast.

💼 Leadership Blind Spots: The Supplier Dimension

Suppliers don’t follow your process by default. And they won’t if you don’t lead.

If you’re serious about improving incident handling, start with:

• Reviewing every external SLA and matching it against your business’s expectations

• Defining OLAs between internal resolver groups and your vendors

• Creating shared major incident playbooks with key suppliers

• Escalating based on impact — not contract clauses

• Including suppliers in post-incident reviews — with action logs and real consequences

You don’t manage incidents with tools. You manage them with relationships, rules, and rehearsals.

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🧠 CIO WAR CHEST: The Leadership Questions That Expose the Gaps

Let’s arm you with questions that cut straight to the core of your incident process:

1. Who owns the end-to-end resolution of a major incident across teams and suppliers?

   • Ask: Head of Operations or Enterprise Incident Manager

   • Artefact: Enterprise incident response plan and RACI model

2. Which vendors form part of our critical incident pathways — and are their SLAs fit for purpose?

   • Ask: Vendor Manager / Service Owner

   • Artefact: SLA alignment matrix and escalation flowcharts

3. Do we track incident MTTR including supplier contributions?

   • Ask: Head of Service Ops

   • Artefact: MTTR reports split by supplier, internal vs external delay flags

4. Are our suppliers included in major incident rehearsals and post-incident reviews?

   • Ask: Incident Manager

   • Artefact: Participation logs, supplier PIR contributions

5. How do we escalate during off-hours across different time zones and support models?

   • Ask: Support Lead

   • Artefact: Out-of-hours escalation playbooks and vendor contact protocols

🚨 Major Incidents: The Leadership Gap That Breaks Trust

When a major incident hits, every minute counts. But here’s what happens too often:

• Nobody knows who’s really in charge

• Comms teams scramble to craft updates no one agrees on

• Suppliers dodge accountability behind support tiers

• Internal teams argue about logs instead of fixing the issue

This isn’t technical. It’s organisational failure.

Major incident management isn’t an ops process. It’s a leadership test.

And without a named enterprise leader — with real authority — you fail that test before it starts.

🔄 It’s Time to Rebuild for the Real World

We’re not in 2007 anymore. Your service model is hybrid. Your dependencies are sprawling. Your user expectations are unforgiving.

Incident management must evolve — or your credibility won’t survive the next failure.

🚀 Coming Up Next

Next, we go deeper into what happens after the incident is closed with:

Blog 8: Problem Management – The Missing Link in IT Stability

If your team keeps fixing the same issues and blaming the same suppliers — it’s time to get serious about root cause. Let’s do it properly.

💼 Need Help Rebuilding Your Process?

If your incident handling is stuck in the past — and your suppliers are slowing you down — it’s time to lead differently.

At Harrison , we help CIOs transform incident operations into integrated, accountable, and high-trust machines — across internal teams and suppliers.

Let’s build the process your business deserves.

👉 Talk to us