Identifying Knowledge Management Challenges in a Service Desk: A Case Study

Service desk plays a central role within IT service management. The main goal of the service desk is to record failure reports and service requests from software users and customers. The main contribution of this study is to present knowledge management challenges in the service desk function of a large IT service provider company in Finland. Data for this study were collected through interviews with 31 service desk workers. Several challenges were identified in the service desk work. Challenges were related to incident classification, quality of instruction documents, automatization of incident and order processes, escalation of incidents and the interface between incident management and problem management.