Rude though it may be, the KISS (keep it simple …) principle bears particular relevance today to the enterprise service desk. There’s a fundamental appetite for simplicity. With so much going to the cloud, the expectations, both for business users and executives, have changed completely. With SaaS, we can get new services up and running in days. IaaS resources are available on demand, this morning if need be. Our online collaboration is easy to setup and adapt, and it virtually always works the way we need it.

Contrast this current reality with how the service desk has traditionally been run. Huge, complex, and cumbersome platforms. Teams of developers dedicated full time to ongoing customization. Six-figure investments up front.  Laborious integrations.

Good luck approaching a CIO today with a three year plan for a service desk rollout—with incident management deployed in six months, change management coming six months later, and so on. You can imagine the CIO’s response: “We’ve rolled out SaaS-based sales force automation, procurement, and marketing platforms in weeks, why should our service desk eclipse all those time and dollar investments combined?”

Exacerbating matters is the fact that this can lead to a vicious cycle. Executives don’t want to invest more into the service desk because it doesn’t add up financially. Because these investments don’t get made, the platform gets static, and the business value it delivers diminishes further.

Consequently, simpler isn’t just a better way, it’s the only way.

Note: This is the first in a five-part series of posts on the simpler service desk. Stay tuned for our next post, which will look at the implications of SaaS.