A Service Desk is a primary IT function within the discipline of IT service management (ITSM) as defined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
It is intended to provide a Single Point of Contact ("SPOC") to meet the communication needs of both users and IT staff and also to satisfy both Customer and IT Provider objectives.
A service desk seeks to facilitate the integration of business processes into the service management infrastructure. In addition to actively monitoring and owning Incidents and user questions and providing the communications channel for other service management disciplines with the user community.
A service desk also provides an interface for other activities such as customer change requests, third parties (e.g. maintenance contracts), and software licensing.