11. A system configured to correlate an incident service ticket with an incident resource ticket comprising: at least one computer-readable storage medium storing computer program instructions; and at least one data processor readably coupled to the at least one computer-readable storage medium, where execution of the computer program instructions by the at least one data processor causes the at least one data processor, in response to a creation of an incident service ticket in a certain service category; perform a first search for open incident resource tickets of the same or similar category, perform a second search based on a set of similarity rules for corresponding critical configuration items defined in business service configuration items and, when both the first and second searches succeed, to perform a third search of found open incident resource tickets from the first search ordered by time using found corresponding critical configuration items from the second search and, when a match is found, to declare the incident service ticket to be correlated with the matching incident resource ticket.
11. A system configured to correlate an incident service ticket with an incident resource ticket comprising: at least one computer-readable storage medium storing computer program instructions; and at least one data processor readably coupled to the at least one computer-readable storage medium, where execution of the computer program instructions by the at least one data processor causes the at least one data processor, in response to a creation of an incident service ticket in a certain service category; perform a first search for open incident resource tickets of the same or similar category, perform a second search based on a set of similarity rules for corresponding critical configuration items defined in business service configuration items and, when both the first and second searches succeed, to perform a third search of found open incident resource tickets from the first search ordered by time using found corresponding critical configuration items from the second search and, when a match is found, to declare the incident service ticket to be correlated with the matching incident resource ticket. 17. The system of claim 11 , where characterization of service to resource associations is determined during service design, and where association of a service instance to a specific resource or resources is made during service instantiation based on historical data or prior knowledge as reflected in the critical configuration items.