Operación del supresor

The Service Desk is not regarded as a process within ITIL but as a function.

As IT has become a greater part of business over the years the role of the Service Desk has become crucial. Businesses relies on there IT service to stay on top of the market and be competitive. The service provided by the Service Desk tends to be broader then just the IT part of business hence the change in name from Helpdesk (which was more IT related) into Service Desk. It plays a vital role in IT Service management as from a customer point of view the service desk is the IT Service Provider and therefore plays a critical part in how the customers perceives the IT organization as a whole.

Among the activities performed by the Service Desk are Incident recording and Incident Control. This used to be part of the Helpdesk Process but is now included in the process called Incident Management (covered in a later module).

5.4

Activities

The Service Desk has a number of primary responsibilities. These are: • To provide a single point of contact for the customers;

• To facilitate the restoration of normal operational service (with minimal business impact on the Customer) to the agreed service levels and according to the business priorities.

6.0 Activities

1. Keep users informed by....

2. Providing information, in the form of: ? The status of their incident ? Planned changes in IT Service ? Likely disruptions in the IT Service

? Any changes or additions in the services that are provided or the service levels. The obvious benefits in proactively providing service information is that:

If the customers know before hand that a specific service (e.g. email) will be unavailable during the lunch hours you (a) reduce the amount of calls being received but also (b) reduce the impact of the disruption. The end result will be fewer angry or annoyed customers.

3. Provide management information

By logging all calls the Service desk can provide information to Management about, the amount off calls per category, the amount of calls as a result of a change etc. But also in case of a disruption in the IT Service they are likely to be the first to know. This makes the Service Desk an excellent

First Point of contact for users, customers and management alike.

The objective is to produce reports from which management can make decisions and measure performance based on agreed service levels and deliverables.

4. Conduct customer satisfaction analysis and surveys 5. Recording and controlling of incidents

Incident control

The Service Desk is responsible for recording all incidents and then controlling them. The Service desk can use different ways in recording the incidents:

• Phone • E-mail • Internet • Fax

• Personal visit

By making use of different ways of recording incidents and even automating the solution then the workload of the service desk will be reduced and by association so will the costs.

Think about how much time it costs to reset a password for a user and how often that is required. If by sending an email a set of actions would be started including: creating the incident, resetting the password, informing the customer and closing the incident a great deal of time could be saved.

6.1

Roles

The new Service Desk tends to be more then the just the place to lodge calls related to IT. It has a role to provide and improve the service to the business in general. The changing role is that the Service Desk is a more customer focused, whereas the traditional Help Desk tended to be more technical in nature.

As there are different types of Service Desk models the skills required by the Service Desk staff also must be carefully analyzed.

Interpersonal skills are one of the more important ones. Technical skills become more important when the Service Desk becomes more skilled and aims to solve most of the incidents without rerouting them to higher levels of support.

6.2

Relationships

Being the single point of contact for IT Service, the Service Desk has a link with all processes within ITIL. With some processes the link is a clearer than others.

The Service Desk is, in fact, an operational aspect of the important process of Incident Management, e.g. incident control. The Service Desk registers and "controls" Incidents.

Incidents can be related to Configuration Items. If this link is supported by software, a powerful aid in mapping/identifying weak links in the IT infrastructure evolves.

This allows the Service Desk staff to quickly solve incidents by searching on a Configuration Item, category and/or error code and applying a previously used solution.

Note: A Configuration Item (or C.I.) is discussed in the Configuration Management process section. A C.I. is an item that we want to store information about.

In some cases the Service desk does some minor changes and so has a link with Change Management and Release Management.

The link between the Service Desk and Service Level Management can be illustrated as a result of the Service Desk monitoring Incident levels and reporting whether the IT service is restored within the limits defined in Service Level Agreements (SLA's). Service Desk will report to Service Level Management if IT Service is not restored within time frames and escalation procedures are properly defined and adhered to.

6.3

Benefits

The benefits from a properly implemented Service Desk flow across Users, Customers, IT Staff and the business as a whole.

Note: The difference between a Customer and a User should be explained. A Customer is the person who may often be the representative of the business for the service provided and/or the person who funds the service. The user is the ultimate end user of the service provided.

Benefits for the Customer

• Easily defined metrics for measuring performance

Benefits for Users

• Single point for all queries • Better informed

• Quicker turn around of request, queries and incidents

• Greater efficiency

• Better use of the skills the staff has resulting in motivated personnel • Improved team work

Benefits for the business

• Source of useful management information • Internal cost savings and productivity efficiencies

• Meet customers business support requirements with responsiveness at all times when and wherever it is needed

• Better use of available resources

6.4

Summary

An effective Service Desk will deliver overall cost reduction and increases in staff morale, service reliability and identification of business opportunities. All this leads to increases in Customer satisfaction ratings, with the associated improvement in perception this brings.