Service desk versus help desk: what is the difference?

The service desk was an evolution of the help desk, born from the ITIL of the ITSM best practice framework (formerly known as IT Infrastructure Library) and based on the concept of "IT management as a service".

A help desk is born from IT centricity (mainframe processing), while a service desk is born from IT centricity (the approach ITIL calls to deliver IT as a service).

It may seem small, but many will say that a help desk offers help, while a service desk offers a service, that is, a service desk that focuses on offering a service to end users with a customer service appearance.

A help desk is considered to be focused on break-fix (this is called ITIL incident management), while a service desk is there to provide support not only with break-fix, but also with service requests (requests for new services) and requests. of information (such as "how do I do X?"). Although there is no reason why a help desk cannot offer these extra functions (except trends in IT terminology).

A help desk complemented existing IT activities, while the service desk is part of a service-oriented IT service and an IT supporting ecosystem that is built around something called the "service life cycle". Probably a big reason why the term service desk was used on the ITIL help desk.

ITIL experts will say that a help desk is tactical, while a service desk is strategic. This will of course differ between organizations.

A help desk can be considered as a subset of service desk functionality or can be qualified within the range that is limited by statements such as "the evolution of the help desk to the service desk".

But the help desk of one person is of course the service desk of the other person: organizations name their IT support options as they want, as the following HDI study shows:

We see that 41% of the help desks and service desks are called something else. In addition, there is no guarantee that the service and help desks reported in this HDI survey are in accordance with our descriptions above. Some claim that the help desk and the service desk are not that different and, looking back on history, the terms were often used interchangeably in the 2000s. But the most important thing to remember is: a "service desk" is usually an advanced version of a help desk made in an ITIL mold.

Also read : remote help desk