In our discussions and posts on service desk, we employ the ITIL definiiton of a service desk. And where we reference ‘help desk’, we also intend to mean service desk. For ease, the ITIL definition for service desk is:
Service desk
The service desk is one of four ITIL functions and is primarily associated with the Service Operation lifecycle stage. Tasks include handling incidents and requests, and providing an interface for other ITSM processes. Features include:
- single point of contact (SPOC) and not necessarily the first point of contact (FPOC)
- single point of entry
- single point of exit
- easier for customers
- data integrity
- streamlined communication channel
Primary purposes of a service desk include:
- incident control: life-cycle management of all service requests
- communication: keeping a customer informed of progress and advising on workarounds
The service desk function can have various names, such as:
- Call center: main emphasis on professionally handling large call volumes of telephone-based transactions
- Help desk: manage, co-ordinate and resolve incidents as quickly as possible at primary support level
- Service desk: not only handles incidents, problems and questions but also provides an interface for other activities such as change requests, maintenance contracts, software licenses, service-level management, configuration management, availability management, financial management and IT services continuity management
Please answer for me some question…
– What is the sub-function of Service Desk? Interface of Service Desk with other ITIL’s function?
– Flows internal function in Service Desk? Describe? Analysis? Interaction with external?
– Overall model of Service Desk? Interface with user? with other function?
I don’t know this
Sorry if I’m incorrect English grammar
Thank you very much!
Huyen,
I recommend first to check out service desk definitions on Wikipedia in their ITIL section. It is pretty complete and I think helpful. Feel free to email me again for more detailed or additional questions after you have perused this material. And your English is just fine (especially for engineers 🙂 ).
Best, Jim Ditmore
Follow up question: Do you feel field services/desktop admins on site are an extension of the service desk and could benefit from aligning with the same leadership or do you feel that it may be a better fit with the desktop architecture teams?
Generally, it is a better fit with the Desktop Engineering (and architecture) teams. The field service engineers should utilize the same service request tracking systems as the Service Desk (typically ServiceNow), and should have the same responsive, customer focused view as the Service Desk agents, but their training and their career path lies with the Desktop (or Client Devices) Engineering team. Thus you can attract better personnel into the field services if there is an opportunity for them to move up to the engineering team, and the engineering team will have more affinity with them and understand better the actual problems end users are facing if they are more closely associated. On a final note, for major migrations or replacements, the field services team must be part of an integrated program team to execute the transformation so perhaps another good reason for the field services team to be under the same management. Let me know if you have further questions!
Best, Jim