The human discipline within Service Management suggests that while technicians are addressing a particular incident and resolving it, they should also see if similar incidents have occurred elsewhere in the organization and try to determine the underlying causes of those incidents. A trouble ticketing or help desk system essentially just tracks incidents, while a service desk approach groups incidents into problems (infrastructure, patch, security implementation, etc.) and addresses the underlying causes, which are then resolved via configuration management scheduled change and release. If an organization knows what assets it has, how those assets should be configured, how assets relate to each other to enable IT services, and who is accountable for both the maintenance and operation of both the high-level service and the underlying hardware and software, the organization can now move into true service-level management.

Once IT services are identified in this manner, the organization can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of both service delivery and service operation. This can then drive plans for service improvement based on clearly understood costs, accountabilities, and requirements. At that point, the organization finally has the foundation elements needed to intelligently plan and implement IT service management and service level improvement as a function of corporate strategy. IT moves from cost-against-product to active partner in developing competitive advantage on a business-operational level. When all is said and done, many organizations don't use their service desk tools either to track, monitor, and manage the services they provide, or to deliver the level of business information their work associates might reasonably expect. How is the service desk operation adding value to the business? Is it correctly aligned with the organization's objectives in the first place? Is the enterprise realizing value from its investment in IT? How is the service desk supporting effective IT governance?