The challenges IT departments face today are many — from providing system uptime in line with ever-increasing expectations, to lowering costs while maintaining high service quality, to shifting from a pure operations mode to one of driving innovation and creating new services.  IT is being asked to not only do more with less, it is being asked to deliver it more quickly, cost-effectively, and accurately— and to a broader audience.
During the recent economic downturn, IT budgets experienced a 20 percent or more reduction, removing most, if not all, of the 30 percent of budget devoted to “innovation”.  Not surprisingly, this has caused IT departments to scale back new services and instead focus on “just keeping the lights on”.
Today, IT departments are faced with a new set of requirements from the business — everything from rolling out new web-based services, to supporting a whole host of new types of mobile devices, to acquiring new companies or expanding again into new markets. 
Some of the key challenges for today’s IT organization include:
• Managing Costs
• How do you get the most out of every asset, project, person, and activity?
• Improve Service Performance
• How do you meet the expectations of your organization?
• Increase Transparency
• How do you provide the business with visibility into the cost of IT?
• Add Business Value
• How do you ensure IT activities and decisions support business priorities?
• Enable Compliance Controls
• How do you reduce risk and enforce standards required by internal/ external policies and mandates?
How your IT organization responds to these challenges not only can affect the levels of service provided by your organization, but also can significantly affect your company’s bottom line. 
The service desk is the face of IT to your consumers, and as such, is essential to keeping your business running smoothly.  With much of the headcount in IT dedicated to supporting the service desk, the ability to improve, streamline, and automate core service desk processes is essential to freeing up experienced and skilled talent and allowing them to take on more strategic projects that deliver new capabilities and services requested by the business.  In addition, service desk efficiency allows you not only to maintain a competitive edge, but also differentiate and create new revenue.
However, there is more to IT service management effectiveness than the service desk alone.  Therefore, in view of today’s highly complex and changing IT infrastructures, you not only must effectively streamline your service desk processes, but you must also reduce and eliminate the risk inherited in piece-meal or unproven service support solutions.
IT organizations that are achieving process efficiency, effectively managing costs, achieving compliance, and delivering superior service quality understand the value of an integrated IT service management platform and a forward-looking IT service management strategy.  Replacing disjointed activities for incident, problem, change, release, and asset management with a unified service support strategy is the key to providing truly business-aligned services.
Simply stated, IT service management is the core area of functionality for how organizations request and support IT services — and how these services are delivered to the customer.
A comprehensive IT service management platform allows you to handle service support issues today, while growing and adding additional capabilities in the future.