Service Desk

A Service Desk is a functional unit made up of a dedicated number of staff responsible for dealing with a variety of service events, often made via telephone calls, web interface, or automatically reported infrastructure events.

The Service Desk is a vitally important part of an organization’s IT Department and should be the single point of contact for IT users on a day-by-day basis – and will handle all incidents and service requests, usually using specialist software tools to log and manage all such events.

The value of an effective Service Desk should not be underrated – a good Service Desk can often compensate for deficiencies elsewhere in the IT organization; but a poor Service Desk (or the lack of a Service Desk) can give a poor impression of an otherwise very effective IT organization!

It is therefore very important that the correct calibre of staff used on the Service Desk and that IT Managers do their best to make the desk an attractive place to work to improve staff retention.

The exact nature, type, size and location of a Service Desk will vary, depending upon the type of business, number of users, geography, complexity of calls, scope of services and many other factors.

In alignment to customer and business requirements, the IT organization’s senior managers should decide the exact nature of its required Service Desk (and whether it should be internal or outsourced to a third party) as part of its overall ITSM strategy (see Service Strategy publication) – and then subsequent planning must be done to prepare for and then implement the appropriate Service Desk function (either when implementing a new function, or more likely these days when making necessary amendments to an existing function – see Service Design and Service Transition publications).

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 960