a password reset is...

[danatwork]

If Joe User reaches out to the Service Desk and wants his password reset, either because he forgot it or he locked himself out of his account by trying the wrong one 3 times, then that is ...

An Incident?
or
A Service Reqeust?


I've seen some documentation suggesting it is a Service Request, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that....

Thanks,
Dan

[Mark Stanger]

What you label it is just a matter of how you want to report on things. I would say it's a request, but I can see how it might go either way. What you really need to think about in regards to ServiceNow is what process matches most closely. With something like a password reset, it might get labeled as a request, but it probably fits better process-wise in the incident table. There are many cases like that. You can add another flag to the incident table to label those things as a 'Request' type; just don't get sucked into putting it into the service catalog just because you've got a table there with a 'Request' label.

[David Thigpen]

In my opinion, it is less important what you call it, than that you are consistent in your approach. Some organizations might even consider it a change request and handle it via a standard change, perhaps even in the catalog.

David

[jiri_nesvadba]

An incident is when something doesn't work as it should (this may be simplistic but users generally understand the explanation better than the official ITIL definition). When a user forgets or mistypes a password, the system is designed to reject the login - hence no incident. What else you call it or which process / application you use to manage the requests depends on your needs, e.g. to report this back to customers, build a business case for self-service around automatic password reset, etc.
I hope this helps,
Jiri

[itapish]

It is important how 'Reset my password' is categorized. As per ITIL v3 definition of incident, an incident is 'An unplanned interruption to an IT Service or a reduction in the Quality of an IT Service. Failure of a Configuration Item that has not yet impacted Service is also an Incident'.
As per this definition, 'Reset my password' cannot be considered as an incident. An incident may have generic SLAs to fix them, whereas a service request has a definitive time period to be completed, especially for 'Reset my password' type of requests which have well known executions steps (SOPs). In ServiceNow, an end user can't track the status of 'Reset my password' as an incident as good as she can track it as a service request, and can't come to know how long it will take to reset the password.

I think that 'Reset my password' was considered as an incident in ServiceNow because if it were considered a service request then it would have to be a catalog item, and a catalog item can be added to the shopping cart and this would look odd that 'Reset my password' could be added to the cart. On a different note, what I have observed that other than price related services, most of the services of the service catalog are record producers either for incidents or for changes; I think this is not a very good design.

Furthermore, 'Reset my password' incidents will unnecessarily grow counts (though could be filtered out) of the total incidents of the application for which passwords are reset.

I wish that ServiceNow take a note of it and make appropriate changes to the overall Service Catalog design/flow.