Standards: Incidents and Deviations

This short post is more of a footnote to an earlier post about Incidents, Problems and CAPA.

A colleague mentioned to me that he saw no real difference between Incidents and Deviations, because they are just different terms for unplanned events, one is an ITIL derived term and the other used more in the Life Sciences industry.
Without thinking too much I agreed, but then I started to ponder if this was really the case; it seemed to me there was a difference.

A deviation is an event that is contrary to an expected result or an incorrect operation; normally the event is a deviation from something stated in a plan.

An incident is an just event, but does not have to be a deviation; an incident is usually based on something in a procedure.

An example of incident that is not a deviation could be:
You may have a performance management procedure that states the system is configured to send an alert email when disk space drops below 10% free. When this happens, the email is sent and this is an Incident, but this is not a deviation, since it is an expected operation of the system.

However, in ITIL version 3, we have the "Request Fulfillment" process, which is designed to describe these incidents-that-are-not-deviations (as I have discussed previously), so maybe there really is no difference...although I still feel there is.