Actually what Best Practices says is that you shouldn’t be addressing the issue in the Service Desk or Incident Management process at all. What you have are a set of Incidents with similar symptoms for which the Root Cause is unknown. In other words, you have a Problem. Best Practices says that people fulfilling the role of the Problem Management process should look at the Incidents and determine the Root Cause, of which there could be several. If they come up with multiple solutions to the Problem, then they should write up multiple Requests for Change.

It is then up to people performing the activities of Change Management to assess the Requests for Change on three different levels – Technical Merit, Financial Merit, and Business Merit. From the meeting of these different (and sometimes conflicting) view points, one of the Requests for Change could be selected for implementation.

The reason Best Practices says you should go through the Problem Management process is because without sufficient Root Cause analysis, you could be mis-diagnosing the cause of these Incidents.

The reason Best Practices says that the resolution to the Problem needs to be assessed by Change Management is because this is where the Business, Financial, and Technical aspects are weighed. It’s possible that one solution is very cost effective (good Financial assessment) but an unacceptable solution to the Business (bad Business assessment). Etc. Etc.

I hope that gives you a Best Practice perspective.