service desk

Malcolm Fry asked me this question for his Session 602 The Service Desk: Past, Present & Future at the upcoming HDI conference in the USA. His question reminded me that I have been off in the philosophical never-never for too long. It is high time I got back to the bread-and-butter folks at the pointy front end of IT: the service desk team. So here are my thoughts on Malcolm's excellent question: What will affect the service desk over the next three years? Tweet this.
[Updated 25/2/13: added Bring Your own App and internal social media]

VMWare are maintaining a stony silence about the future of VMWare Service Manager, better known to most of is as InfraEnterprise, a great service desk product originally out of Australia. Rumours are rife, with a strong concensus that version 9.2 or 9.3 likely to be last version of a total ITSM solution - there will be no VSM 10. VMWorld is on now, let's see what comes of it...

Here is an exciting new approach to categorising and resolving any sort of activity "tickets", such as requests (including incidents) on a service desk, problems, or changes. It is called Standard+Case until somebody comes up with a better name. I know there is so much to read these days, but if you have anything to do with service support or change management, read this. It'll change your year.

Standard+Case is a synthesis of our conventional "Standard" process-centric approach to responding, with Case management, a discipline well-known in some other industry sectors such as health, social work, law and policing.

S+C addresses criticisms of approaches like ITIL for being too process-centric and not allowing customers and knowledge workers to be empowered. S+C does not seek to replace or change ITIL or other theory: it expands and clarifies that theory to provide a more complete description of managing responses.

It provides a good skills path for service desk analysts that fits well with gamification. And Standard+Case is applicable to Problem Management and Change Management (and Event Management...) as well as Service Desk activities. S+C applies to anything that requires a human response: there's either a standard response or there isn't.

For more information about Standard + Case, see the Basic Service Management website.

Servicesphere brought to my attention the recently announced product from GMA that is an "ITIL-aligned SharePoint IT Service Desk Solution". I break out in a cold sweat just hearing that. So what is meant by "ITIL Aligned" and "Service Desk"?

Who does the service desk serve? That comes back to what the support service is there for.