Incident Management Three Tier Categorization

[Barbara21]

Incident Management has a two tier categorization. However, the organization I work for wants to add a third category. Has anyone implemented a third category in Incident Management? Adding a third tier can be a little messy and the list will grow longer throughout the years, probably in weeks.   I dislike the idea, but I would like to hear the opinions and recommendation of others.

Thank you,

Barbara Tejeda

[Uncle Rob]

How do you determine the operation that is being performed on the ticket?

If it was a hardware failure of some sort, then that would be specified as the affected CI.

How do you determine the difference between what the user is saying the issue is, versus what investigation determines the actual issue is?

I first make the assumption that in almost all cases the customer doesn't know what the underlying issue is, and I don't attempt to capture the delta.   They report a degredation or an outage to a service, and my job in Incident management is to restore the service.

It's been my experience that many companies are not at a maturity to actually populate the CMDB with CI's in the beginning. Being able to at least know that it's related to a specific product type (i.e. Microsoft Outlook) without actually having a CI is very valuable. How can you accomplish this?

Any organization that can propose a list of common categories can do the same thing for CMDB classes.   I then *sometimes* (depending on the customer) populate each CMDB class with at least one "generic / unknown" record.   This would represent "I don't know which specific blackberry, but I know it has to do with blackberry".

Generally any company that advertises a high level of maturity on their category trees *has* the maturity to conceive and manage the CMDB.   They've just opted not to.

[Uncle Rob]

Additionally, ServiceNow at least allows the entry of tags, so we can capture the same data you'd normally see in Categories, but across as many dimensions as we please, for as many tags as are relevant.   Unfortunately at the moment its only half a solution.   They really need a tag cloud building interface so we can understand the tag impacts in aggregate.