Categorizing Incidents for various IT groups

[Michael Domke]

There are many different IT groups in my company that manage and support their own "stuff". Regardless of what that "stuff" is, when there's an issue, an Incident is created and assigned to the appropriate group.

Out of the box functionality for Incidents within ServiceNow works for a generalized environment and we've actually customized our instance further to be a little more granular in how Incidents are "categorized". That is, what data we collect to document the Incident.

The issue we're having right now is that several of these groups are becoming more familiar with what ServiceNow can do in terms of customization and they are now requesting very specific needs in terms of categorizing their Incidents. Specific fields with specific choice values, etc. These needs are specific enough that they really can't be shared among other groups.

What I'm afraid of is that we'll need to manage a whole sub-set of different ways to categorize Incidents for many different groups. For example, one group wants a certain choice list of categories and other field types and other groups want something unique to their "stuff". This could get messy.

My question to the community is to find out what others may have done to manage this varying type of Incident categorization.

Thanks for any input,

Michael

[sgrison]

I have more questions than answers to assist you...

Incident categorization structure should be built to suit all of your IT groups. There should be a single process for all of your groups which includes categorization.

What types of specific categorization are they requesting?   More importantly what is this data being used for - auto routing? reporting?

What fields are you using to categorize? (category, subcategory, CI ? )