Service Desk is the primary interface of the IT Organization. Its primary goal is to facilitate the communication, identification and restoration of critical IT services within the agreed upon service levels. It is responsible for acting as a single point of contact for the entire IT Organization and has primary responsibilities around Incident Management, Executive reporting as well as providing the primary support for the business operations.

Traditional IT Help desks focussed on managing the calls, communication and resolution of incidents. The ServiceDesk represents the IT Service providers and focusses on blending process, people and technology to deliver complete customer satisfaction.

The primary responsibilities of the service desk include

1. Act as the single point of contact for IT Service related issues
2. Service Desk is responsible for co-ordination and management of the Incident lifecycle, including priorities, issue referrals and escalation.
3. Primary channel of communication between IT Service Provider and End Users including incident and change status reports, managing service catalogs etc.
4. Other responsibilities may include business process support and executive reporting
5. Provide data to the related processes like service level management [ about service level data], configuration management [about missing or invalid configurations] and change management [ feedback about the issues introduced by recent changes ] etc.

As we deploy our service desk processes in the organization, we are facing some challenges due to the resentment from the IT staff that is concerned about various items that would change in their daily lives. Overall the deployment of the service desk should bring about a cultural change in our organization.

From my perspective, I am slowly realizing that our ITIL implementation leaders are getting too carried away by tools instead of identifying robust processes that can eliminate a number of concerns from the IT community. We have finally convinced them to postpone the deployment of ITIL until the end user base and the IT services organization were comfortable with the processes.