Time and again I have come across many questions if 'Service Desk' is a process or a functionality. I completed my ITIL training recently. I was full of questions regarding the same. I filled the classroom with the clouds of confusion over this topic. Many students came up with the same questions and some of them advocated against the fact that "Service Desk' is a functionality. Now before I make this statement, I need to be very sure of what I am trying to advocate. Ofcourse the fact that the it is indeed a functionalilty as described in ITIL documents. But my answers to "Whys" are very clear.
First... what I realised practically from my experience is that a user is completely isolated from the problem of repeated calling and finding the right person for the resolution. 'Help Desk' serves as a single point of contact (SPOC) for all the issues to be reported. From here all the resolutions are provided. It handles all the incoming calls and escalates them to the second or third level of support only if badly needed. Service Desk staff consists of skilled and experienced IT technicians. Service Desk is also responsible for regular updates to the customer about the status of thier request (in other words, 'tickets' and the 'users' as known in corporate companies).
It is an important part of Incident management process of providing an operatinal single point of contacts to manage incidents to resolution. Two main focuses of the Service Desk are Incident control and communication. Again here communication plays a very important role. I have come across situations where the helpdesk co-ordinator in our company picks up the call for some issues and ends up with raising a ticket for some other issue. In this case when this ticket is assigned to the concerned IT technician, it creates the whole confusions leading to a total chaos. This results in customer (user) dissapointment and a prolonged downtime., which adversely affects the business outputs. This is how the very purpose of IT service management looses its complete definition just because of the lack of good communication at the first place.
First... what I realised practically from my experience is that a user is completely isolated from the problem of repeated calling and finding the right person for the resolution. 'Help Desk' serves as a single point of contact (SPOC) for all the issues to be reported. From here all the resolutions are provided. It handles all the incoming calls and escalates them to the second or third level of support only if badly needed. Service Desk staff consists of skilled and experienced IT technicians. Service Desk is also responsible for regular updates to the customer about the status of thier request (in other words, 'tickets' and the 'users' as known in corporate companies).
It is an important part of Incident management process of providing an operatinal single point of contacts to manage incidents to resolution. Two main focuses of the Service Desk are Incident control and communication. Again here communication plays a very important role. I have come across situations where the helpdesk co-ordinator in our company picks up the call for some issues and ends up with raising a ticket for some other issue. In this case when this ticket is assigned to the concerned IT technician, it creates the whole confusions leading to a total chaos. This results in customer (user) dissapointment and a prolonged downtime., which adversely affects the business outputs. This is how the very purpose of IT service management looses its complete definition just because of the lack of good communication at the first place.
So now this is very clear that Service Desk is indeed a functionality. Now the question is who plays the most important role in this functionality ?? Read on....
