IT service desk vs. IT help desk: What's the difference?

IT focus vs. end-user focus

Charles Betz

The IT help desk came first. It was created in the late 1980s to fix IT issues, Mann said, a principal analyst and content director of ITSM.tools, a website devoted to evaluating ITSM practices and tools.

The IT help desk focused on IT instead of the end user, according to Mann, but as business technologies advanced, the need for a more business-focused function arose. Thus, the concept of managing IT as a service came to the fore and the IT service desk was born.

IT service desks found guidance in ITIL, the IT service management (ITSM) framework developed in the 1980s to standardize the delivery of IT services and which in recent versions emphasizes the alignment of IT with business outcomes.

Stephen Mann

"It was convenient to change the name -- not have it be a 'help desk' but a 'service desk,'" Mann said, but stressed this name change was not just about terminology; it signaled a shift in IT's role in the enterprise.

"A service desk was also a change from the traditional 'break-fix' of old. With the old help desk, you used to call an 800-number and hopefully someone would call back in two weeks, if you were lucky," he said.

Mann believes that even though an IT service desk automates many IT functions, it still provides help, and that's because many users view it as a trusted place to seek help, no matter if it's a big service offering with multiple ways to reach multiple sources of help, or if it's a small product with one expert.

"If you ask the customer whether they are being supported, they'll call it a 'help desk' because they want help," he said. "You would think in 2018 there would be a push to call it whatever customers call it. If [companies] are trying to be customer-centric, they would call it what customer the customer wants to call it."

IT service desk vs. help desk vs. ESM

Forrester's Betz sees the name game possibly going in a different direction, pointing to a development that's been flying under the radar for at least 10 years: The IT service desk expanded into an enterprise service product.

For at least a decade, Betz said ITSM companies such as ServiceNow allow employees to use the service desk to seek help with non-IT matters such as tracking down colleagues in other facilities, filing tickets for plumbing and electricity issues, and other inquiries that require human intervention but can be triaged through automation.

The field is called Enterprise Service Management (ESM), and Forrester claims to be the first analyst firm to recognize it as a market, Betz said. CERN -- the European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world -- uses ServiceNow for ESM. "It's not just IT, but finance, health, occupational matters," he said.

Time will tell if most users and marketers will call ESM "ESM" or consider it a function of IT service desk or even IT help desk. As long as they know what these functions are good for, maybe a name doesn't matter at all.