ITxpo: Service desk best practices and methodologies

This morning’s first session for me, Excellence in IT Service and Support, was a review of best practices in service desk management. A few interesting data points came out in the context of the talk, including informal survey results (of Gartner Data Center conference attendees) indicating that about 62% of respondents intend to adopt ITIL, either alone or with other methodologies; the number for ITIL alone was 31%.

This was interesting to me because the further in ITIL one gets away from service desk and incident and problem management processes, the more the coverage of the standard starts to overlap with other well-defined process libraries. For instance, processes in ITIL, including release management and change management, dealing with internally developed applications have a natural overlap with the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which has software development as its focus. Organizations with internally developed applications need to consider not only which portions of ITIL, but also which portions of other methodologies, they may need to adopt as they carry out process improvements.