At a time when IT is supposed to be getting simpler, less complex and easier to manage, more people are calling service desks for assistance than ever before, according to a study by the HDI, formerly the Help Desk Institute.

What HDI found is that the number of incidents reported to  service desks via chat, e-mail, telephone, self-help systems, social media, the Web and walk-ins is rising, with 67 percent of all service desk operations experiencing increases in 2010. And all this at a time, perhaps conveniently, when some of the predictions for 2011, notably from John Clark on ITSM Portal, suggest this will be the year IT Service Management (ITSM) comes of age.

That increase in ITSM maturity is because despite setbacks and failures in the industry. IT organizations still must drive efficiencies, increase agility and speed, increase quality and effectiveness, all while significantly reducing costs. This still requires a process, service and most importantly customer focused approach if they hope to remain relevant within their organizations. Process design and improvement will follow business process management and improvement practices. “Redo” projects and new projects will be scaled back to focus on definitive business results and customer outcomes versus. trying to accomplish rigid goals prescribed by the ITSM industry that perpetuated them.

In recent years, many organizations have moved to centralize their help desk operations and establish a single point of contact for workers. Those centralization efforts have improved incident data collection, which helps to explain the spike in reports. In addition, creating a single point of contact – and offering multiple ways for people to reach the help desk – has only encouraged users to seek assistance. Looking ahead to 2011, a recipe for ITSM success must be to focus on the people aspect. As the respected ITSM specialist Ian Clayton recentIy commented on ITSM Portal, ITSM is irrelevant unless it is directed squarely at the interests of the customer community, otherwise as Ian has done, you risk having to rescue failing ITSM projects by converting them into non-ITSM focused, customer centric continuous improvement programs.

An effective approach, Clayton suggests, is to reconnect with each of your customers and one by one map, inspect and improve each example of how they interact and use IT to get their work done.

The challenge for infrastructure and operations departments is always whether they can deliver quality services that empower their business customers and that is directly related to overall organizational and process maturity.

In tackling that requirement, and given the continued negative concern towards organizations’ current service desk alternatives, it is perhaps no surprise that 2011 will continue to see organizations voting with their feet away from legacy systems to meet their need for customizable, codeless and integrated alternatives.