Towards an Improved IT Service Desk System and Processes: A Case Study

An IT service desk provides a Single Point of Contact for the customers and users regarding support requests. The world-wide adoption of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework has also pushed organizations to improve their service desk operations. However, improving the service desk is a serious challenge for many IT service providers. Many government organizations in Finland have started to use ITIL in their service desks and need help in configuring service desk tools and defining processes. The research problem of this study is: How could an IT service provider’s service desk operations be improved by using IT service management best practices? The main contribution of this paper is to present results of a case study on IT service support in Finnish Tax Administration. First, the customer support challenges are described. Second, we present how these challenges were solved by using ITILbased practices. Third, we show how service desk performance and ITSM training usefulness were measured. Finally, lessons learnt from the case are presented. Keywords-Service Desk; service management; IT service; incident management.