An analyst with Enterprise Management Associates had said to me that what used to be known as the “IT help desk” is now known as the “IT service desk” to better describe the role of the IT department in the business.
She said the name change suggests to the business that IT offers “full service of any type of request.”
But a comment recently made to me by an executive with IT service management vendor Axios Systems would suggest that perceiving IT as a service provider remains a challenge within the IT department itself.
Barclay Rae, global head of services with Axios Systems, told me his vision was for IT service management (ITSM) to become more accessible to a broader spectrum of people within IT. Currently, Rae said, ITSM is recognized by operational and help desk groups of the IT department, but not necessarily by others.
He said application developers, for instance, don’t always understand the service aspect of what they are doing. As a result, after applications are built, more time is spent supporting them than would otherwise be necessary had they been developed with service in mind.
