There are ten processes and one function defined in the most popular books in the current IT Infrastructure Library (Service Delivery and Service Support). The function is the Service Desk Function, usually known as the Help Desk (or, in Metron's case, ActionLine). It may be that IT management consultancy is a fashion industry so that yesterdays "silo" is today's "process" and may become tomorrow's "function".

The Service Desk plays a key part in the provision of IT Services. It is usually the day-to-day prime central point of contact for business users seeking assistance when something in IT does not work as expected. (Note that ITIL® likes to distinguish between Users who are essentially the end-users of the IT service and Customers, who are essentially the budget holders paying for that IT service.)

The Service Desk mission is to ensure the restoration of the service for the user as quickly as possible by whatever means.

As such, its objectives are to handle incident calls, service requests and ensure effective communications internally an externally to provide advice, guidance and rapid restoration of normal services; and to drive and improve service to and on behalf of the business. This involves actions to log the event or incident and progress the resolution in terms of work-around, education, documentation or changes to code, keeping the user informed throughout.

Some Help Desks provide a simple call logging function, and escalate calls to more experienced and trained staff. Others (such as ActionLine) provide a high degree of business and technical knowledge with the ability to solve many incidents at the time that the business user reports them. Depending on the system and the user, a significant % of incidents can be resolved without reference to any software or documentation changes.

Although not one of the 10 ITIL® processes for ITSM Delivery and Support, Service Desk is the application which almost all sites purchase to coordinate their internal ITSM Help Desk activities. Any itSMF exhibition is currently dominated by the Help Desk vendors.

Perhaps the fact that there is a clear deliverable with a direct interface to the real users of the system gives it the practicality and immediacy that merits attention.

Perhaps it could be said that if you implement an effective Help Desk, you can forget the rest of ITIL®. That certainly seems to be the apparent position at a lot of commercial sites which have not adopted ITIL® in its entirety.

The Service Desk is the visible link to the outside world and has to exist. Other ITIL® processes are mostly internal and their absence may not even be properly recognised by experienced IT practitioners.