Yesterday I was talking with a friend who asked me what it is I do at Elsinore.  I explained we are an issue management company and the minute the words came out of my mouth I realized the vagueness of the statement.  If I wasn’t already sure, the confused and pondering look on his face confirmed my suspicions.  So like most people I dug into examples, explaining how customers use our software for help desks, call centers, software bug & defect tracking, and a few other examples.  The entire process took me about 5 minutes and if it had been giving an elevator pitch I would have failed miserably.  I needed to be able to explain what issue management is without giving a 10 minute dissertation on the subject. I still need to be able to explain how our products relate to issue management but explaining the term issue management correctly was my first hurdle.

So like most people today I went directly to the almighty source of wisdom, Wikipedia.  There I found a pretty good definition of the term; Issue management is the discipline and process of managing business issues and usually implies using technology to electronically automate the process.   I say pretty good because I am not convinced that if I share this with my friend he will not still have a similar look of confusion but it’s a starting point.

My next step was to interview about a dozen colleagues and friends to get their response to what issue management meant to them.  I did my best to find a random sampling of different backgrounds and experiences.  I contacted people in staffing, construction, software development, stay at home parents, teachers, and engineers.  The responses I got were varied but not surprising, every person I talked with related issue management to their own day to day life and industry.  Staffing people described services to manage labor cost and customer issues, construction managers related the term to managing and coordinating the problems with each build, developers talked about tracking software bugs, and stay at home parents gave examples of scheduling conflicts and work that needed to be completed at home. 

It was becoming apparent that issue management was a marketing buzz word that meant different things to different people, maybe not as vague as terms like “business intelligence” and “B2B” or as over used as “out of the box” or “best in class” but still difficult to quickly explain.  But there was something about this term that resonated with everyone I spoke with today.  They were all able to relate the term issue management to a problem they were having and needed a way to resolve.  I read through everyone’s responses again and it started to mesh, stilling a bit from different passages I have a working definition that I am pretty happy with going forward.  It may still raise a few questions from time to time but overall I think it works. Issue management is a methodology by which problems, events, and other issues are identified, tracked, and ultimately resolved.