Why evolve your service desk?

I’m excited to announce the publication of a new report called Evolving the Service Desk, which we’ve prepared jointly with the Service Desk Institute. (SDI). In this blog post I’d like to whet your appetite by telling you a little about the topic, and about why it’s necessary to evolve the service desk.

Like any form of evolution, this one is ultimately a matter of survival. Service desks now face a number of challenges arising from rapid change in the world of business and technology. As a service desk or IT manager, you need to embrace these challenges to ensure you continue to meet the ever changing expectations of your customers.

The future success of the service desk - and of the IT as a whole - depends on your ability to demonstrate that you're creating value that the business can't create for itself. Understanding and tackling challenges such as shadow IT and "bring your own device" (BYOD) demonstrates an agile and flexible service desk that can deliver an improved customer experience.

We know that many service desks are already doing their best to tackle to these challenges, but the evolutionary process now needs to accelerate. Your service desk must move right away from the inflexible world of silo-based corporate IT to embrace today’s consumer-driven and dynamic model.

To help you achieve this rapid evolution, this new report examines the challenges faced by the service desk, and offers practical advice on dealing with them. It covers shadow IT, hiring and retaining staff, preventing knowledge attrition, and more.

I hope that’s given you a feel for how the report could help you, and an understanding of why Hornbill was keen to support it. We at Hornbill recognize that we ourselves have a vital part to play in enabling the evolution, by providing innovative solutions that lighten IT’s workload and help the service desk give users the right experience.

In future blogs, I’ll delve deeper into what the report has to say about specific aspects of the evolution, starting with shadow IT and BYOD.