Section: Service Desk Process. Q: Is there a well developed schema for the categorization and identification of recorded incidents?

As per ITIL, the Priority and Incident Categorization and Identification should be a product of the Impact/Urgent Matrix. It is customary that Priority has four to five levels, and is marked with the numbers 1-4 or 1-5, where “1” is the highest and “5” is the lowest priority. It can also be marked by letters ABCD or ABCDE, with A being the highest priority.

Impact – how critical the downtime is for the business. Usually, it is measured by the number of influenced users. If one or more services are down, the number can be determined from CMDB or Service Catalog.

Urgency – it is usually defined in SLA for the specific IT service. If more than one service is impacted, parameters for the higher urgency service will be taken into account.

Most of the priorities are common:

1. High

2. Medium

3. Low

Each priority will have it's own Impact, either High, Medium, Low and also will have its Urgency, also, High, Medium, Low. In addition, every Incident will have an agreed Resolution Time, which will be based on the Impact and Urgency of the Incident.

in addition to the above answer relationship between impact and urgency maybe classified to severity levels. this will depends on the manner of impact on the business.  Severity 1 may be classified as halting of the business itself due the issue, major revenue impact, all clients operations are affected urgency for this classification is HIGH. Severity 2 is where not all but most business functions are affected minimal revenue affecting, 50 percent services are still operational but urgency is still HIGH.

Recorded incidents can be categorized into four priorties as Low, medium, high and urgent