I have always taught that the Service Desk does not own the Incident Management Process, but they do own the Incident Records. They may not define how Incident Management does its job through the multiple functional areas of IT the Incident may traverse, but they are responsible for “Managing request life-cycle, including closure” of all Incidents.

This puts the Service Desk in a unique position of being the functional IT group responsible for ensuring that the Incident Record does not get stalled during its life-cycle.

Many organizations have not delegated the authority to the Service Desk Management to ensure that Incident Records are followed up on. How many organizations allow the Service Desk Manager to tell the Server or Telecom groups that they aren’t doing their jobs? But this is in fact the Service Desk’s responsibility according to ITIL.