5 Elements That Make Up the ITIL Service Desk

The IT Infrastructure Library has established best practices and operational frameworks to help organizations provide efficient and reliable IT service management processes. This process began decades ago when ITIL initially emerged as a leading ITSM framework, and the reference guide has continually evolved and matured over time. Frequent updates and additions to ITIL have made the best practices more attuned to modern ITSM needs, and much of this change has focused on creating more flexibility in response to new technology demands.

While all of this change across ITIL has been substantial, and often beneficial for organizations, there are still a few core elements of ITIL that give the foundation for effective ITSM operations. Five of those key components of an ITIL-based IT service desk include:

1. Incident management

Incidents are the everyday issues that business and technology users face when applications and services don’t work exactly as they should. Incident resolution can involve resetting passwords, finding a work around for a glitch or simply having a user restart his or her computer. Generally speaking, resolving incidents is the bread and butter of a support worker’s day, and the ITIL framework is built to streamline incident management in a variety of ways.

2. Problem management

Of course, some incidents are a sign of underlying problems in the IT configuration. ITIL has established problem management as a set of practices designed to help support teams identify these issues and initiate the process of resolving them.

3. Change management

Changing the IT configuration is a risky matter, especially if you do not have a clear understanding of how the change will impact other systems or who will be performing different tasks within the larger change process. ITIL is designed to help organizations organize these functions and create the operational framework needed to eliminate risk associated with change without sacrificing business efficiency.

4. Ticketing

Handling incidents, problems and change tasks requires careful prioritization so that support teams can balance urgent requirements with long-term projects. Ticketing solutions, within ITIL, are designed to organize and prioritize support tickets to make sure nothing slips through the cracks and allow support workers to focus on completing key tasks instead of organizing their inbox.

5. Service Request Management

Not every support ticket that reaches the service desk will fall neatly into an incident, problem or change label. ITIL processes include service request management as a way to segregate different support queries so that employees can focus on working within their areas of responsibility and expertise.

ITIL is built to facilitate efficiency, and these core ITIL-based service desk modules accomplishes this in diverse ways.