Each interaction between your employees and your service desk affects the reputation of the entire infrastructure and operations (I&O) team. To delight (or, as we like to say, wow) members of your workforce, they must see you as effective, pleasant, and easy to work with. The service desk is the single point of contact for all business and technology service questions and an essential communication platform for all the operational processes in technology management. The service desk is also responsible for answering, escalating, and resolving enablement issues for other teams within technology management and other players in the ecosystem.

This report provides I&O pros with five steps to creating a service desk that is internally and externally effective.

While the joint efforts of security and IT operations ultimately determine an enterprise’s security strength, the individual goals of these two groups are often misaligned, thanks to conflicting responsibilities and different metrics for evaluating and rewarding successful performance. The result is what industry analysts are calling a “SecOps gap,” where poor collaboration between these two groups results in unnecessary security vulnerabilities, business-system downtime, excessive labor costs and challenges meeting regulatory requirements.

These problems came to the forefront in an exclusive new survey by Forbes Insights and BMC of senior security and IT managers at large enterprises in North America and Europe. A series of in-depth interviews with executives on both continents uncovered best practices for balancing security, IT system uptime and regulatory compliance. A common theme emerged from the survey and the one-on-one interviews: today’s enterprises need a modern game plan that uses technology, people and processes to close the SecOps gap.