When does a dedicated Service Desk make sense?

[jasonrkr]

Group,

Hello. I'm wondering if it's possible to determine when a dedicated Service Desk is necessary and when it's more trouble (management, FTEs, bloat) than it's worth?

My company is looking to start one and has asked if I would be interested in taking on this role. I would have one or two employees under me manning a Monday through Friday Service Desk. I am interested, but am wondering if it's going to be a new level of management that will be phased out early or if it's really a viable position given my company's size. My company is about 2000 employees, 24/7/365 work. We currently have a Network Manager, Database Manager, and Operations Manager. What they'd like to do is move the Operations manager to Financial Applications and add the Service Desk manager.

I would appreciate any insight or experience the group can share.

Thank you.

Jason

[itilimp]

Hi there, please can you also explain how your users currently get support from IT to resolve their issues, introduce new services, etc.?

At the moment I'm surprised that there isn't currently a service desk function in an organisation of 2000+ employees - but that is without knowing the above. Do you effectively actually operate one with technical staff manning the phones on a rota and resolving incidents straight away?

[jasonrkr]

itilimp,

Thank you for your response and I apologize for the limited information I provided.

Currently, we have the Data Center staff, under the Operations manager, working as both the help desk and repair crew. We have one full-time day, evening, and night shift person assigned to Operations. We use Track-it! for asset management and repair history. Where we seem to be running into problems is in follow-up of trouble tickets and in anticipating the needs of our customers. These are two of the main problems that they hope the dedicated Service Desk would solve.

My question is whether it would be best to solve it with our current setup or would we better serve our customers by breaking that out into its own group.

Jason