Zero Footprint... (Score 1)

I work for the Justice cluster of Ministries in Ontario (Canada eh). We use NAI's Magic Total Service Desk solution. It is 100% web-based with zero footprint on the desktop. Currently it requires IE due to its use of DHTML (Netscape/Mozilla functionality is coming slowly). The administration capabilties are all drag and drop (like Delphi but all within a browser) and creation of forms including workflow is fairly straightforward.

Having the end solution web-based is a HUGE time saver as we develop business processes and views of the information and we don't need to redevelop a web-based version. Of course, it's just a tool, and investing in a technology without considering process and people requirements is a recipe for failure.

As for process, we are big supporters of ITIL and have implemented ITSM (IT Service Management). In a nutshell, ITIL is what thousands of organizations have documented by way of best practises for process - the ITSM processes are:

Incident Management (including the Service Desk function)
Change Management
Problem Management
Release Management
Configuration Management
Financial Management
Service Level Management
Continuity Management
Service Level Management
Capacity Management
Availability Management
Security Management

It's non-proprietary and designed as a framework and not a "you must follow this or perish" set of guidelines.

I would strongly encourage looking into a best practise framework as many of your questions over the long term will be answered.

Cheers,