Incident type

[Earl L]

Does anyone use a "type" categorization (separate from category and sub-category) for incidents? I'm thinking of choices that is along the lines of "problem", "outage", "question", etc. These could apply equally to the category/sub-category scheme, and add some additional clarity to reporting and routing. Any thoughts?

BTW, this goes directly to the out-of-box configuration of the categories and sub-categories. As they come they are mixed and are somewhat difficult to work with as they are.

Earl

[Aaron40]

I've seen this happen a few times but not with the examples you're using.

Typically questions are not incidents, nor are problems incidents. An outage could be an incident though. I would say it's not at all uncommon to have a type field for your particular type of record if it meets your business requirements.

But I wouldn't necessarily suggest you use the type of "Problem" on an incident unless you can clearly differentiate an incident problem from a problem problem 🙂

[Earl L]

Aaron,

Thanks for the response and your thoughts. I'm curious about the statement you made: "I've seen this happen a few times but not with the examples you're using". Can you help me understand this a little better? Under what circumstance did you see it?

One thing that you might want to make note of is that the out-of-box "Ask a question" feature that SN delivers is accomplished through an incident record producer. So, to someone at ServiceNow at least, asking a question is an incident. And since this is out-of-box behavior I would suspect that lots of questions are in fact incidents for many organizations, assuming they use this feature.

Where I am our IT fulfillment and support staff are very accustomed to having all of their support requests be treated as incidents. This might have more to do with what was available to them, in terms of tools, but it's also where ITIL puts requests for support, at least as far as I recall.

Perhaps I was a little hasty with the labels I was using when I wrote my post. When I wrote "problem" I was thinking along the lines of a support request, which I assume would be an incident, not a service request.

Earl

[Aaron40]

Hi again.

In the Dublin release they do something a little different with questions as opposed to incidents I believe. They were doing show and tell at our user group meeting in MN last night.

What I meant by that is I've seen people use "type" or another field to further specify the type of incident for better reporting, just not using those examples you provided.

I link to this article a lot but it's an excellent read. http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol6iss27.htm

Basically it explains incident classification. If the classification works for the business and makes sense to the business, then it probably isn't a bad idea to do it. Every business is different and so is the needs of each individual business. So long as the business agrees on how to classify incidents and everyone uses it the way it was designed, you'll have an effective way to classify incidents. That said, that's why I probably wouldn't recommend using "Problem" because people could confuse a Problem incident and a Problem.

[Daniel Draes]

I have also seen a type field in free life 🙂
And I believe it makes sense especially for thinks like questions.

With Dublin however, as best practice we recommend using the call wizard: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Best_Practice_-_New_Call_Wizard

This could also help.