ITIL incorporates practices and procedures in a number of IT management areas, including the help desk, that are designed to enable organizations to figure out the root causes of IT problems and predict future difficulties.

The increasing call volume at the university keeps the staff busy, said Begley, adding that "it is frustrating, because they see the same problems occurring over and over again." His hope is that ITIL implementation will lead to reductions in some of those repetitive calls.

Technologies that could reduce help desk support demand include things like desktop or application virtualization, where an application can be accessed via a browser. And increasing use of voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology reduces the time it takes support phone systems.

For those organizations reporting an increase in help desk calls, about 41% attributed the uptick to infrastructure or product changes, upgrades or conversions; 26% cited expanded service offerings by the support center; and 22.5% said they have more customers, according to the HDI study.

I suspect that the reason is more that there is a bigger disconnect between IT geekdom and regular people now than there ever was.

In the past, technology was pretty universally understood to be cumbersome and unwieldy to a degree. However, in the past couple years, consumer devices have generally done a decent job of hiding complexity from the users. Enterprise IT systems, on the other hand, have not. What could result is a new disconnect when it comes to usability expectations. The nerds are living in their isolated world where the status quo still reigns. The users are living in a world where RTFM or taking time to understand the technology doesn't cut it anymore.

Geekdom, as a whole, does not understand what user experience really means or what it's all about and this disconnect between users and IT is why after all these many years, I'm starting to get fed up and disillusioned with IT as a whole.

ITIL's great, but it can't solve this fundamental problem.