Incident Management - Service Request

[raroa]

We in the ITIL community may debate this forever. My engineering training tells me that if the answer is not stable then you are trying to cleave the problem along the wrong axis, you are not attacking it "along the grain".
That's an abstract way of saying I suspect the ITIL authors should not have differentiated so strongly between Incidents and Service Requests because the distinction is not crisp. First, there will always be cases that do not clearly fit in one category or the other. Second, it may not be clear which category a ticket falls into until some amount of investigation has been done.
My personal preference is to treat them all as one process and try not to get too hung up on the distinction: the user wants something, the Service Desk must help.