Management thinks it is a cake walk in the park

It takes the right kind of person to do this job right. A rare combo of social and technical skills.

You'd think that the legacy service desk vendor community would do their part to make the service desk person's job as easy as possible, but judging from insane upgrade projects and overall difficulty to manage one of these old systems (Remedy, Service Manager, Tivoli, etc.) the service desk is forced to put up with headache from both users and vendors.

By the way, if service desk resources are constrained, consider an on-demand ITSM product like Service-now.com. It is built on the Internet, supports ITIL v3 plans, and is true SaaS. Never worry about managing or upgrading again, and customization is finally simple and easy.

It's unfortunate that the Service Desk Employee has to take on additional responsibilities and roles without adding any additional compensation. Pay for Level 1 support is now turning into pay for Level 2 and sometimes Level 3 support. It's no longer about getting the call, creating a ticket, and routing it to the responsible location. They now have to get the call, troubleshoot the issue and resolve (FCR). This becomes difficult to manage when you have SLA's to meet, client expectations, limited resources, and increased network devices and applications to support.