At work we have a ticketing system, phone, email, IM, and ancient technology like person to person chat. Naturally, that just means I can get work requests via any one of those systems. Ideally, everything would flow through the ticketing system, however things don't work that way yet, so I have to function as an ticket creation gateway.

I think others don't create tickets to send me lies in the difficulty in doing so versus the relative ease of emailing me (and knowing that I'll create the ticket). So, I should want to make ticket creation as easy as possible, and share that technology as much as possible.

Typical ticketing systems strive to force data into a structure, so the user interface can suffer from drop-down selectionitis. I think a free-text google-suggest-like interface might work well as an additional input method to the normal dropdowns, as you slow down your typing rate, the suggestor starts to return the possible result set.

However neat that may seem, I really just want my computer to do the heavy lifting for me, so based on the recent IM chat, email thread, phone transcript, etc., to parse it all and constrain the ticket data options accordingly.