Value of the Service Desk

Respond more quickly to urgent business needs and incidents while simultaneously providing stable, secure and predictable IT services, despite the fact that the systems on which the business operates are typically fragile and hostile to change. Sound familiar? Improving operational reliability and communications between ITSM functions and processes begins at the Service desk.

I have to quote a coworker of mine at this point “All things flow through incident management”. The service desk is the eyes and the ears of the IT organization. If you think about it and utilize the service desk from both an operational and tactical perspective , ensuring that all of the other ITSM processes and functions are feeding accurate and up to date information and data that the service desk needs, they can become the glue that that binds the entire organization together in alignment with both IT and strategic business goals. A single great process alone cannot deliver as much value to the organization as many processes working together in a coordinated effort. We must be able to effectively capitalize on the entire support organizations knowledge and expertise, forcing it to the lowest common denominator, where it can be utilized when engaging the customer /user.

The value statement here is reduced re-work, less downtime, better utilization of higher cost resources by eliminating the need to escalate incidents and requests to a higher level of technical expertise; increasing the stability of the overall environment and delivering predictable levels of IT services (Quality).

Today in ITSM circles there is much talk of IT being a strategic partner with the business and in my view we are. Almost everything the business undertakes has some IT component and cost to it. However, the perception of most senior business managers is that IT is just a cost of doing business, nothing strategic about that. So it is imperative that before we begin the journey of changing that perception we have to show how IT provides value for money. That begins with delivering the right set of services, at a consistent and predictable level to meet those Agreed SLAs and of course that begins with a high performance Service Desk.

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