[Blog] Incident and Service Requests: What's the difference?
What degrades the quality of IT service the most? The lack of a streamlined service process in the organization. This directly affects IT efficiency and productivity, besides the end user’s perception of IT.
A substantial way to drive your IT organization's maturity to the next level is to identify and separate your standard requests break-fix type of incident tickets from service requests.
Many people assume that a "How-to" question is an Incident.
As per ITIL v3 definitions, "a request for information or advice" is a service request as this type of request is not related to the interruption of IT services.
Here is the difference between an Incident and Service request as per ITIL v3 definitions:
Incident: An unexpected interruption to an IT Service or reduction in the quality of an IT service – for example, server is down, fixing a printer, network slowness.
Service Request: A formal request from an end-user for something to be provided – for example, fulfilling a request for information/advice or access; to reset a password, change printer toner or to install a workstation for a new user.
