It is important in this step that the single point of contact function becomes a staffed service and someone is allocated the responsibility to provide this service. The operation of this Service Desk may be as part of a shared responsibility or involve a rota of technical staff.

The goals for this step are as follows:

• The service desk is staffed during its operational hours
• The service desk takes all requests (not just problems, but also request for changes to the ICT environment)
  
• The service desk attempts to diagnose and where possible resolve the caller's problem. (including previous call research)
  
• Log information of calls. (this may be in a spreadsheet, database or service desk software)
  
• Service desk is prioritising calls and allocating them to technical staff
  
• Prioritising of calls is based on 'priority of service' not the priority of user
  
• Service desk 'owns' all logged calls and accepts the responsibility for being the interface between ICT users and technical support staff
  
• Service desk is acting as the interface to users of the ICT, providing information regarding logged calls, incidents and service outages
  
• Service desk is collecting information about the reported incident and passing that to technical staff

The operator of the service desk should 'own' the responsibility for any logged request.

So what does this mean?

Once a call is logged, the resolution of that call is the responsibility of the service desk. Though they may not be the person who resolves the issue, the management of the call and keeping the person who logged the call informed of progress should all fall into this responsibility.

Part of the service desk job is to remove the need for ICT users to be constantly requesting information on what is happening with a logged call. ICT users should be confident that once a call is logged it will be dealt with fully, within the agreed service levels for that service, and that they will be notified of the resolution immediately. This is an important part of the user community's acceptance of the process and confidence that the service desk can perform this task well is vital.

Select an appropriate call logging procedure
It is important that details of the calls are logged whether this is in a spreadsheet, a database or some bespoke call logging software. There are a number of free/relatively cheap pieces of software available and the size of your environment will determine what is appropriate. At this stage, it is better to implement a simple solution and revisit this in the future once you have a system running when you would review the overall process.

A number of the processes involved in the service desk management can only be developed and improved by looking at the history of calls logged. The more sophisticated the software, the more facilities it may offer you, but the important factor at this stage is that call details are being kept. Everything else that you implement relies on you having accurate data to work with.

Now let's have a look at Step 3 - Full service desk implementation.

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