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From Help Desk to Service Desk

November 15th, 2006

There are so many help desk tools out there, most of which now call themselves service desk — that I find it very confusing to understand all the nuances. I found this forrester report really useful (and it is avaliable for free, from the altiris web site).
It compares Altiris, Axios Systems, BMC Remedy, BMC Magic, CA, Front Range Heat, HP Peregrine, HP Openview Service Desk, Numara, Touchpaper and Unipress.

Here is an excerpt from the begining which I thought was simple and insightful …
“The organization formerly known as the help desk is growing up. Under the moniker of “service desk,” it is expanding its footprint and adding such functions as problem, change, and configuration management to its previous incident-focused role. The classic help desk was somewhat limited
in its scope and parochial in its focus: Users would call with a problem, and technicians would endeavor to fix it as quickly as possible. Help desk software would track incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. Once solved, reports would point out potential hot spots for further study and possible proactive action. Only rarely would the help desk have incidents opened directly from systems management utilities or be tied into any formal change management process.

As processes and procedures for ensuring the continuing health of the IT infrastructure developed, more complex workflows and organizational handoffs were required. Enterprise-class tools to support this service management followed. Common structures and practices added a framework for further refinements. Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure following the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations.

Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale change to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on desktop life-cycle management, with (but not at the expense of) workflow, tracking, and reporting tools.“

Entry Filed under: Change Control