When is it an incident?

Rob England in a recent post brought up the topic of distinction between a Call and Incident in the ITIL V3 Books! I then went to the book and started reading through the IM Process and did not really find a classification there, which Rob also confirmed in his update on the post here.

Now if I look at it closely, ITIL V3 book in a way achnowledges that the source of an Incident can be more than one places, e.g. Event Management, Web Interface, User Phone Call, Email technical staff, but really does not talk about where a call or an event would become an Incident (Fig 4.2 in the Service Operations book)

In my experience with two IM Processes here is how it worked

1. The User Interfacing process was Call Management (based off IBM EOPs) and it determined where the call should go and be tracked. In case of an Incident, it would trigger an incident management process for service restoration and incident resolution, for the rest, it would either end at the Service Desk as a question which was answered or a first contact resolution or would trigger a request fulfillment process. This was based on IBM EOPs, which I felt were much more comprehensive and implementable than ITIL recommended processes.

2. Everything that comes to the Service Desk is a Service Management ticket, and becomes an incident ticket only when its determined that it is an interruption to service and has an SLA impact

In both the cases, there was a many to one relationship between the calls/SM tickets to Incidents… multiple calls could be logged or multiple SM tickets could be logged for the same issue if there were multiple users calling or logging tickets themselves using a web interface, however these tickets would be associated with one single master incident which would then be published and pursued  for resolution and service restoration.

From an ITIL V3 perspective, I think one would have to leverage on the Event Management process to be able to log events and then classify them into Incidents, however leaves the How-To questions, and Service Requests aside, and does not tell how to deal with them.