Creating the appropriate incident categories and subcategories is critical for obtaining useful incident reports and for routing incidents efficiently. Everyone with a stake in resolving, managing, tracking and improving incident management needs to see logical reports. What areas are experiencing the highest number of incidents? Which areas have the most high priority incidents? What category has the most escalated incidents? All of these questions require well-defined categories.
The base instance of ServiceNow contains the following categories:
- Request
- Inquiry / Help
- Software
- Hardware
- Network
- Database
Each of the categories contains several default subcategories. Before editing the categories and subcategories, talk to the right people. Some organizations use a smaller list of categories and some create more. Beware of the "unknown" or "other" category that can become a dumping ground. In a great thread here in the ServiceNow community, Aaron Anderson recommends a very helpful article by Hank Marquis named How to Classify Incidents.
Ideally, categories and subcategories are planned and organized before going live with ServiceNow. If you do make changes to categories and subcategories later, there can be ramifications. For example, if there are workflows, UI policies, or client scripts running against the category or subcategory fields.
A ServiceNow user with the admin role can add or remove incident categories and subcategories. For detailed steps, see Categorizing Incidents in the ServiceNow product documentation.
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