Justification and role of the Service Desk

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 event s, 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 user s on a day-by-day basis – and will handle all incidents and service request s, 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 requirement s, 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).

Very little justification is needed today for a Service Desk, as many organizations have become convinced that this is by far the best approach for dealing with first-line IT support issues. One only needs ask the question ‘What is the alternative?’ to make a compelling case for the Service Desk concept. Where further justification is needed, the following benefits should be considered:

• Improved customer service, perception and satisfaction
• Increased accessibility through a single point of contact, communication and information
• Better- quality and faster turnaround of customer or user requests
• Improved teamwork and communication
• Enhanced focus and a proactive approach to service provision
• A reduced negative business impact
• Better-managed infrastructure and control
• Improved usage of IT Support resource s and increased productivity of business personnel
• More meaningful management information for decision support
• It is common practice that the Service Desk provides ‘entry-level’ positions for ITSM staff. Working on the Service Desk is an excellent ‘grounding’ for anyone who wishes to pursue a career in Service Management. However, this could also present challenges with people who do not understand the business or technology. User s calling the Service Desk should be able to speak to someone who is able to address their needs, and Service Desk Analysts should not be burned out in less than a year because of undue stress. Care should be taken to select appropriately skilled individuals with a good understanding of the business and to provide adequate training – thus preventing reduction in levels of support due to a lack of knowledge at the first line.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23