> The classic organisational structure for IT Service Management is the three-tier support hierarchy: > - Level 1: A frontline Service Desk, directly fielding

> The classic organisational structure for IT Service Management is the three-tier support hierarchy: > - Level 1: A frontline Service Desk, directly fielding incoming customer communication (typically by answering phone calls). [...] > - Level 2: A second tier of support, often closely associated to the Service Desk, but with deeper general or specialist skills. [...] > - Level 3: Specialist support teams focused on specific technologies and applications. [...] It's amazing how one can write a description that is correct, yet so wrong and misses the point so much. Three-tier support structure is not centered around staff's training. It's centered around the staff's responsibilities. - First tier is people who help customers directly. As customers usually have most trivial problems, these people mostly need the most basic skills from technical point of view (though the most diverse in all three tiers). - Second tier is administrators, whose work is structured differently than just sitting at desk phone and waiting for somebody to call. If they were to be interrupted as often as first tier staff, their work would suffer heavily. - Third tier is either programmers of some system or veteran administrators that sit so deep in their system that they rarely see the sunlight. These people work on a completely different schedule than first two tiers, who work largely (or mostly) in a reactive manner, so any interruption is very, very costly for third tier's work. Third tier is only called when their attention is absolutely unavoidable.