The service desk is the single point of contact for all IT-related customer requests and is the face of IT to the customer. The service desk provides incident management, the goal of which is to restore the customer to a productive state as quickly as possible, either through education, resolution or a work-around. At the same time, the service desk is tightly integrated into many IT processes, including problem management (the process of identifying the root cause of reported problems), change management (the methodology to make orderly changes to the IT infrastructure) and configuration management (the means to record asset information plus the relationships among them).

The service desk participates in the creation, implementation and maintenance of the Service Level Agreement and Operating Level Agreements.