Updated June 8, 2026
Heading to the gym, you have access to so many amenities in one place: cardio equipment, private studios, a pool, a free‑weight area, a basketball court. Imagine if those conveniences were split across separate facilities, forcing you to juggle multiple memberships and trips just to get a well‑rounded workout. It is not exactly a great user experience.
Now look at your employees’ experience when they need help at work. If they have to bounce between email, spreadsheets, chat threads, and standalone tools to get support from IT, Legal, Finance, or Marketing, it feels a lot like that multi‑gym scenario.
While Legal and IT work different muscle groups in the business, consolidating their resources into one IT service management (ITSM) platform, tool, or solution can unify your organization and improve the employee experience.
Departments cohabitating in one ITSM solution aligns well with the guiding principles in the ITIL 4 framework. Cultivating a shared space helps strengthen the focus on culture in service delivery and gives internal service providers and employees a better way to co‑create value together.
The blog series on service management use cases beyond IT offers in‑depth reviews of recommendations and successful implementations from departments like Facilities and Human Resources. These stories help contextualize the value of expanding your service desk investment to encompass multiple service providers. This may be the final post in that series, but there are still plenty of opportunities for other departments to get involved in the service desk—literally hundreds of them.
Guided Stretches for Other Departments in the Service Desk
Each department’s operations impact broader organizational strategies and goals. Eliminating disparate systems and narrowing support tools to one ITSM platform can be advantageous for the organization, encouraging cross-functional collaboration to fuel long-term business objectives and success.
Let’s review some of the departments we don’t view as “traditional” service providers but could find value in commingling within one service desk.
Legal
A technology company’s SolarWinds Service Desk implementation started in IT for basic incident management. Shortly after going live with ticketing, IT expanded their adoption of the platform to track their assets and manage service requests. When they designed the service catalog and published those requests to their employee service portal, the Legal department took notice.
The Legal team was inundated with requests across the business: catering to Sales for new customers, Marketing to verify acceptable verbiage, Human Resources for workers’ contracts, and more. As the organization grew more reliant on Legal, the team needed a platform to streamline request intake, automate ticket routing, and foster more self‑service.
Departing from a homegrown solution full of manual steps, Legal was able to leverage the existing service desk to support their service management initiatives. The blanket legal request form was split into separate service requests, paving the way for more granular reporting.
This segmentation enabled the team to define categories ranging from redlines to requests for proposals, while streamlining triage and routing. As Legal partnered with IT to expand the service desk investment, employees gained a single place to find resources and get support from two critical departments in their organization.
Financial Services
In a different implementation, a hospitality group’s Financial Services department led the selection and configuration of SolarWinds Service Desk. Before choosing SolarWinds, Finance relied on email and spreadsheets to track their work. With spreadsheets as their only source of truth, the team saw gaps in service tracking and fulfillment, leading to confusion, duplicate efforts, and limited visibility.
Finance realized an ITSM platform could help alleviate these challenges, elevate visibility, and improve access to key support resources for both technicians and employees. A major focus of their implementation was configuring custom roles. The ability to scope access rights for their users was essential, since Finance technicians’ responsibilities and data access differed based on request type.
Refining their categories eliminated confusion around request types, streamlined routing, and sparked the creation of valuable knowledge base articles. After Finance went live with the service desk, they helped implement cross‑functional processes with IT and Human Resources, further establishing SolarWinds Service Desk as their single service management platform.
Marketing
The Marketing department handles a wide variety of requests—from events and campaigns to creative assets and business cards—that affect many parts of the business. A biotech organization’s Marketing team needed a system to manage incoming requests more effectively. They also wanted a central place to publish available services and reduce the volume of email inquiries.
The team found they could centralize their offerings and improve their internal services with SolarWinds Service Desk.
To make the most of their time, Marketing created a strategic plan for their ITSM evaluation and implementation. Their goals included reducing reliance on email, eliminating walk‑up requests, improving response and fulfillment times, and streamlining service request processes.
To achieve those goals, they identified stakeholders and future administrators early, making sure core users were empowered to configure the platform to meet both current and future needs.
With clear objectives and defined champions, Marketing implemented and published a diverse service catalog on the service portal. This created operational efficiencies within the department by standardizing request intake forms and improving how they communicated fulfillment timelines and expectations to employees. After their successful implementation, Marketing partnered with IT, Human Resources, and Facilities to help establish broader cross‑departmental adoption in the service desk.
All-Access Membership in One ITSM Solution
A gym membership gives members flexibility—they can design self‑paced workouts from a variety of equipment or lean on trainers for support. Removing the complexity of access and centralizing all departments’ resources in the service desk offers similar benefits to the business.
To solidify the service desk’s presence within your organization, develop a plan that strengthens your business case. Share stories of success supported by data to show the value to department stakeholders. Help other internal service providers assess their current operations so they can see how a shared ITSM platform can support existing processes, improve visibility, and alleviate pains.
As you look ahead, there is also room to layer in capabilities like AI‑assisted ticketing, better knowledge management, and stronger self‑service to make that shared platform even more valuable over the next several years. When IT, Legal, Finance, Marketing, and other teams work from one ITSM solution, it becomes easier to collaborate, standardize processes, and deliver a more consistent experience for employees.
Leveraging your expertise can guide future conversations, amplify cross‑departmental collaboration, and lead to a shared vision for long‑term success in one ITSM solution.
You may also like
