The hierarchical structure is a parent and child relationship. One parent can have several children. For example, an organization has a hierarchical structure. The information of a company and its departments go into organization items. You can recreate the real-life structure of the company in Service Desk by making the departments child items of the company.
Creating a hierarchical structure can be visualized in a tree view. A tree view is used for example in the explorer view's navigation pane. In the organization example, the departments form branches of the company.
In a hierarchical structure you can create only one parent-child relation between two items. In the above picture, you cannot make the Sales unit a child of Invention Inc., as there already is a parent-child relation between the Sales unit and the Sales & Marketing department.
In a hierarchical structure you show parent-child relations. In organizations the hierarchical structure is obvious. However, in configuration items and workgroups a hierarchical structure may not be so self evident. Which information is used to create the hierarchical structure of configuration items or workgroups, depends on decisions made in your organization.
It is only possible to create a hierarchy using one type of item. Showing two different items, such as organizations and service calls in one tree view is impossible. The following kinds of items in Service Desk can have a hierarchical structure:
NOTE: A number of codes
have a hierarchical structure too. The system administrator
maintains hierarchical structured codes. Examples of hierarchically
structured codes are: category, classification, location and
folder.