It Takes an IT Village to Raise a Service Desk

Abstract

Most ITIL practitioners know the basic responsibilities of a Service Desk. What is less often mentioned is what the rest of the IT organization needs to do to help the Service Desk be successful. Oregon State University's (OSU's) Service Desk is relatively new, and we are now in a stage of refinement. In order to be more effective, we are looking at ways to better integrate the Service Desk with other departments within the Division of University Information & Technology (UIT). To that end, we are looking at process improvements and better documentation practices by implementing Knowledge Centered Service (KCS). One challenge is that UIT as a whole may not understand the role of an ITIL Service Desk, and may think it is "just a help desk".