The ServiceDesk has replaced the helpdesk as the preferred term for the IT and business support function within business, with a benchmarking survey giving credibility to the idea that the ServiceDesk is becoming a central business hub.
For the first time ever, the annual IT Service Desk Survey from training specialist STI has recorded the term ServiceDesk overtaking helpdesk as the description of choice. The research shows that the shift is justified, with the old style helpdesk which acts as a call logging facility and passing issues onto technicians largely disappearing. Just 12 per cent of desks described themselves as ‘non-technical’ meaning they act as nothing more than a triage for calls, with the remaining desks describing themselves either as ‘technical’ or ‘expert’.
67 per cent of ServiceDesks now support telephony as well as IT, while 13 per cent look after other business functions, helping to create a central hub for handling business services.
94 per cent of desks have a dedicated website or internet presence for communicating with customers, with 69 per cent offering the option to log calls online, and 82 per cent of customers able to view open tickets on line.
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Changing departmental titles achieves little. The Help Desk may have a new name but it still walks like a duck and it still quacks. Most people still know it is a duck (Helpdesk).
When you make contact with people on the “ServiceDesk” and they can barely speak your language talking over crackly phonelines and clearly work following predefined scripts; it doesn’t matter what you call the “service”.
As the author of ‘How to Manage the IT Helpdesk’, and having documented exactly what the helpdesk ever was before the ITIL upstart, I can see immediately the fatal flaw in this report – “with the old style helpdesk which acts as a call logging facility and passing issues onto technicians largely disappearing” – that is precisely the wrong way round. See my video on the differences between the two at www.noelbruton.com.
The reason the helpdesk was called the “help desk” was because it helped, whereas the purpose of the service desk was as a one stop shop for access to services. This reversal in the meaning of the terminology, as reported here, is Orwelli’s Animal Farm-extreme, with ITIL playing the part of Napoleon.
It was always the service desk that was the generalist call logging provision. The helpdesk would solve problems, with getting the users working again its top priority – or at least that’s the case in the support desks I design, assist, train and manage.
For the sake of the industry, and service please don’t let the servicedesk idea take over completely. Conceptually, the service desk was created for the organisational convenience of ITIL, not for the sake of the business or its computer users.
Such short memories we have.
Thanks for your comments Noel – ITIL as Napoleon certainly made me smile.
I think the ServiceDesk definition changes depending on the business adopting it. While I agree with you that a triage-style service desk doesn’t represent progress, there are plenty of helpdesks that work in this manner. The ServiceDesk to me means proactive service, economies of scale, putting the support team at the centre of all internal processes. We keep talking about IT being a service, no different to HR, payroll, facilities etc, so why do we maintain the idea that IT should be treated differently with its own insular support facility? IT should work for the business and like all the best service operations, it will work best with a centralised, intelligent and informed team of people being on the end of the phone. This to me is what the ServiceDesk concept is all about.
James West