The Ops4Less model of IT Operations cost control:
P A I D ™
People
Get the right people, get the people right
□ Recruitment
□ Culture
□ Motivation
□ Evaluation
Activity
Do the right things, do things right
□ Planning
□ Process
□ Measurement
□ Improvement
Investment
Spend to save money, save money on spending
□ Technology
□ Services
□ Suppliers
□ Projects
Dealing
Manage the business, the business of managing money
□ Funding
□ Service
□ Outsourcing
□ Revenue
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
Sorry, I have to disagree
Having worked for a large "global" enterprise, note the emphasis on "global" vs. "international" I can tell you that it isn't always that simple.
I was involved in an evolutionary Service Desk as the manager for the Japan offices. At the same time we had a Service Desk in Hong Kong, London, New York and Boston. Back then your philosophy was correct, consolidation needed to occur. All of us used 3rd Party Service Providers as our Service Desk Agents. Over time consolidation did occur in North America and London was already consolidated. However, they did not have the same vendor. For those of us in Asia, originally Japan used local outsource while Hong Kong did as well, but with an International company, the same one as a matter of fact that was in use in London. I would call that Phase I.
Phase II involved my desk in Japan "trading up" to the same vendor in use at Hong Kong & London. The plan was to gain some synergy in provider to move closer towards that goal of a single desk. There was just one leap left but New York was not budging. In the end the decision was made for all desks to migrate over to the same service provider in use in North America.
Finally we were all on one provider. Part of that negotiation was around which provider could offer the best solution to achieve the single desk model. Long story short, neither could deliver. Not simply because of the geography or the follow-the-sun concept of a true global support model, but because of the customer, our users. This is all internal service desks mind you, not like we were talking about customers of the company.
The main sticking point was on the internal customers requirement for local language support. No single desk anywhere in the world could accommodate the language issues. Europe alone was a challenge, throw in Japanese, Korean and both main dialects of Chinese at both the human and double-byte character OS/Application level and you have an almost insurmountable challenge.
In the end, the decision was to keep one desk in Tokyo, one in Hong Kong one supporting Europe from Ireland and one supporting North America from the heartland in Ohio. The Firm saved money in the deal, but as you state not as much in a single consolidated service desk model. The failure was based on skill-sets needed not the functionality of the service desk.
So, again, I think it depends on the scale and breadth of the organization mixed with the customer base and geographic location to whether or not a model like a single global service desk can be achieved effectively.
One service desk
Great contribution, thankyou. Yes reality has a way of screwing with general principles.
Some thoughts:
The general principle is about consolidationg service desks: that is the people and the function and the software. If the software is problematic there are still efficiencies in having one group of people using one set of procedures.
Just because you can't consolidate the user-facing-level-0 and level 1 components of the service desk software, doesn't mean you can't consolidate incident and problem and change and configuration and service level reporting and...
You raise a very important issue that I neglected, language. Nevertheless, some organisations operate single, multi-lingual service desks.
One logical service desk doesn't mean one physical facility. I worked with a company servicing 15,000 employees in many countries 24x7. There were three physical centres on a follow the sun model. They had one business unit, one set of processes and procedures, one software, one user interface, one website. If Japan called during the hours that Sydney had the service desk manned, there were Japanese speakers available. If they called out of those (extended) hours they needed to speak English. Worse, they needed to speak Yank or Pom.
Its a bit tricky really
One point you made jumped out to me and that was the business. That was the complexity that was introduced into our equation that set everything on its head. Try as we may we attempted to foresee every possible glitch that would stop the forward momentum. In the end it was the requirements of the multiple business lines internal to the company that made it impossible to pull this one off.
Business groups in Japan for example were 100% Japan focused. That meant from desktop to who they wanted to speak to on the service desk had to be in Japanese. From a business alignment perspective they were so different in terms of processes and local regulatory guidances that we could not have been able to get to a model where a desk could service even a regional Japan/Hong Kong business line because the products were too different as was the culture, language etc.
O.K., I'll make it easier for you. We're talking about the Investment Banking industry here where Money and Ego's flowed like water. So what they wanted, they got, despite how inefficient it may have been from a technology operations perspective. Time to market was king.
ITSM "Evangelist"