It’s sometimes easy to forget how far we have come in the last 25+ years in our industry. We’ve evolved from treating customers as an afterthought—often with outright indifference—to placing customer experience and human-centered design at the heart of everything we do.
Where service teams and service desks once operated as “ships in the night,” they now work toward shared goals with measurable results. This shift toward collaborative, long-term problem-solving has delivered real benefits for customers, users, and the organisations we serve. Today, emerging technologies like AI, automation, and advanced analytics are opening new possibilities to move beyond reactive break-fix models toward proactive knowledge and problem management.
How Do You Marry the Human and the Bot?
Yet this technological progress sits alongside an equally important movement focused on the human side of technology engagement. We’re seeing growing emphasis on experience feedback, sentiment analysis, human-centric design, and employee wellbeing. The challenge lies in reconciling these seemingly opposing forces: whilst technology pulls us towards automating everything, the other side is focused on the human experience and how people actually work. The critical question then becomes: how do we achieve productive harmony between human expertise and automated efficiency?
The answer to this human-technology challenge may already exist within our organisations: the service desk. For years, service desks have successfully navigated the complex intersection of people, emotions, business requirements, and technology. As organisations have evolved, a natural flow of work and stakeholders has emerged through the service desk, from approvals and testing to reporting, feedback, and business engagement.
Service desks often end up doing far more than their job description suggests. In many organisations, they’re quietly handling business relationship management, experience management, IT service management (ITSM) tool administration, reporting, and feedback management. Some even tackle problem management, though I typically advise against this.
It’s More Than Just a People Function
But the service desk is more than just a people function. The real growth and value of service management has been experienced through service desks for many years. In the early days, helpdesks were simply bolted onto existing dysfunctional IT organisations, places where teams did whatever they fancied, based on their own needs and capabilities. Adding a helpdesk actually made things worse for customers, creating yet another layer to navigate with no real power to get anything done.
Structured service management changed this completely. Now the entire organisation and its processes work together towards common goals, with the service desk at the centre rather than stuck on the sidelines.
So, the real transformations over the last 20-odd years? They’ve been facilitated and driven by service desks and the people who work in them. If you want effective transformation and development in service management, it’s best driven and supported by a high-functioning service desk.
Your Service Desk is Your Flagship
The term ‘flagship’ refers to the ship that represents the entire navy—the best ship, carrying the image and aspirations of the whole organisation. A good service desk is exactly this for IT: it’s the face of the entire IT organisation, and its people are how most users and customers engage and get the help they need.
It’s also a bellwether. If the service desk isn’t supported or valued by its organisation, you can bet that relationships with the business and customers will be strained. That’s why it makes perfect sense to start transformation projects through the service desk.
But Why Am I in This Meeting?
Over the years, during audits and consultancy sessions, I’ve heard this complaint countless times: “I’m sorry, but why am I involved in this meeting? This is a service desk audit, and I’m not in the service desk…”
The point they’re missing is that they’re part of a value chain where the service desk sits at the centre (or at least serves as the visible element). They contribute to, and are often key to, the success of the whole end-to-end process, whether they realise it or not.
From a change perspective, the service desk is brilliant for driving projects. It’s visible, staffed with people who can actually communicate, and is well-known across the organisation. Plus, any project is far more likely to succeed if the service desk has been involved from the start, as they’re the ones who’ll be handling the handover and ongoing support.
At worst, the service desk serves as a useful focal point for people. At best? It’s the core engine through which successful new products and services are properly implemented.
Thirty Years of ‘The Service Desk is Dead’ (and it still isn’t)
I’ve been doing service management in some form or another for quite some time now, and the more observant among you might have worked out that I’m not exactly at the start of my career. I’m still not at the end, by the way…
For about 30 years, I’ve heard people, vendors, and industry luminaries tell me that the service desk is dead, redundant, or irrelevant. Yet here we are, it’s still there and thriving. And not only that, but it turns out to be exactly what we need to bridge that human-technology gap I mentioned earlier.
For me, the service desk remains the human face of IT. Yes, it must evolve and is evolving, but if we’re looking for something that can bring together people and technology, it seems like a damned good place to start.
If you’re considering transforming your service desk or would like to discuss how yours fits into your organisation, we’d be happy to help. We’ve seen plenty of service desks that don’t realise how much they could be doing, or how much their organisation needs them to be doing it. Sometimes it just takes a conversation to see what’s possible.
