How’s your IT service desk faring? Hopefully it’s meeting all the agreed service level agreement (SLA) targets, your end users and customers are happy, and so are your service desk agents. Or maybe they’re not and you need to improve your operations, performance, and the perceptions that people have of the delivered IT support capabilities. Looking forward to IT support in 2019, the people who agreed with the former – that everything is great with their IT support capabilities – will still, in many ways, have the same challenges and opportunities as those who agreed with the latter. Odd, I know – with the key difference being that they might be better positioned to address them.

While IT help desk and IT service management (ITSM) tools have been available for 30 years or so, it still might surprise you that not every organization has invested in one yet. Of course, the majority have – from the largest of enterprise organizations to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) – but there are still organizations that operate their IT support and other ITSM capabilities without the help of a fit-for-purpose tool. 

Have you ever stopped to think about which of the many capabilities within your IT service management (ITSM) or IT service desk tool (or home-grown equivalent), and wider IT-management toolset are the most important for IT support? It’s pretty hard to do – to whittle everything you use down to a top 6 – and then the next question is: How does this map to the collective requirements of other IT organizations and their support capabilities. After all, most of us like to be vindicated in our choices.