I would have to argue that the Role of Updating CIs is very likely a distributed one in a large organization. This is because large organizations are going to have a distributed Change Management structure. All updates to a CI should be traceable to a RFC. This may be a Standard Change that doesn’t have to go through the overhead of a Change Control Board, but still there should be a RFC for every CI update.

In large organizations, the Change Management process is usually a hierarchical structure based on region or the organization’s divisions. This means that many different people might be authorized to open Standard Changes. Since Standard Changes are pre-authorized for the individual opening the RFC, the subsequent update of the CI is in effect also pre-authorized.

This means that the Service Desk personnel might, in fact, be authorized to update a CI. But, that level of authority is actually controlled via Change Management’s delegation of opening Standard Changes.

In a perfect world (ITILtopia), the actual updating of the Status or Attribute of a CI would be updated auto-magically upon the submission of the Standard change.