What Is A Service Desk?

A Service Desk is an IT resource for organizations working with ITSM (IT Service Management) as defined in ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). The Service Desk is intended to be the Single Point of Contact (SPOC) towards the customers of the IT department, usually the users in the company.

A Service Desk can easily be mistaken for being the same thing as a help desk. However, the difference is quite big when looking deeper on what a Service Desk delivers.

The Service Desk works to support the different ITSM processes used in the company. That is right, Service Desk is not a process itself, it is called a function.
We are not going to discuss what the different processes do but here is an example of a few processes:

* Incident Management
* Problem Management
* Change Management
* Release Management
* Availability Management
* Capacity Management
* Security Management

The idea is for the company to feel that there is one instance to call to get help and propose change requests. All incidents and user queries are owned by the Service Desk and it is up to the Service Desk to make sure the user's incidents are solved, regardless of if they have sent the request somewhere else or are working on it themselves.

Besides being the single point of contact it is the responsibility of the Service Desk to make sure that services that are provided are working. If an IT service is not working, the Service Desk should try to get it up and running as quickly as possible. It is also for the Service Desk to give system support to the users.