What is an IT Service Desk?

The IT Service Desk is intended to be a primary point of engagement between users and an IT organization. According to ITIL, the service desk is the single point of contact (SPOC) between the service provider (IT) and users for day-to-day activities. A typical service desk manages incidents (service disruptions) and service requests (routine service related tasks) along with handling user communications for things like outages and planned changes to services. A service desk typically has a broad scope and is designed to provide the user with a single place to go for all their IT needs. This results in the service desk playing a pivotal role in facilitating the integration of business processes with the technology ecosystem and broader service management infrastructure.

What is a Service Desk?

• Service Desk vs Help Desk
• Benefits
• Best Practices
• Service Desk Software

Where did IT Service Desks Come From?

The IT helpdesk function was born in the late 1980s as a support capability to fix IT issues. It was a highly technical function focused on the technology rather than the end users. Early IT helpdesks didn’t have the concept of SLAs or time-based targets for resolving issues. It wasn’t until ITIL came onto the scene in the 1990s, capturing IT Service Management best practices, that the concept of the user-centric IT service desk began to emerge. The service desk was seen as an essential part of “managing IT like a service”.

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