Efecte Blog

The death of Help Desk has been predicted for years. I think you could say that the final death punch came in early spring of 2008 when an old and respected Help Desk Institute (HDI) changed its name to Service Desk Institute (SDI).

Help Desk star

But was that just a name play or has something really changed? I think both. Help Desk as a name has a long burden of negative sound. Does ‘unhelp desk’ or ‘helped desk’ ring a bell? This was cleverly swiped away with a new shiny name, Service Desk. But that is just a surface.

Service Desk is no longer a place where you need individual stars to keep your IT from collapsing. Service Desk is more like a football team. Of course you have to have stars if you want to succeed. But you also need a good framework for the players. In football (or almost any other team sport) you call this framework a ‘playbook’. In Service Desk you may call this processes, functions and appropriate tools.

With this playbook Service Desk has transformed from technical IT help to an information channel for users in any IT related requests. This ‘single point of contact’ view has taken away most of the uncertainty from the end users (although some might say just the opposite). And the end user experience is the key that valuates your service at the end of the day.

The time of the heroes is not over but in some sense you can say that the Service Desk has killed the Help Desk star.