What is a help desk?

What is a help desk?

The IT help desk is generally considered more tactical, with the primary objective of helping to quickly resolve end users' immediate needs, technical problems and incidents. The help desk is reactive in nature, but should be efficient and fast. The IT help desk can be separated or part of a larger service desk operation to improve customer service for the organization in general.

Some key help desk functions include:

• Act as a single point of contact (SPOC) for IT support
• Using a monitoring solution for all incoming accidents
• Ticket tracking, routing and automation of email notifications
• Basic incident management offer and support requests
• Some (limited) are integrated with other ITSM practices, such as configuration management and knowledge management.
• Some areas / applications compatible with specialized groups outside the support service
• Provide support for levels 1 and 2 and pass ownership of the incident if scaling is necessary
• Show basic self-service options for end users

Who could opt for a help desk? A set of tools designed for a helpdesk is likely to support service request and incident management and the basic functionality to allow for changes. For smaller and less complex organizations with minimal IT dependency, this is a reasonable and profitable option.

I work with many smaller organizations to improve their IT service management skills and, with practically no exceptions, most are only emerging using the capabilities of the purchased and implemented tool set. These companies could have saved a significant amount of money and obtained the same rewards with a simple help desk solution: a complete service management solution is not for everyone.

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