February 3, 2009 at 6:18 am
The Gurus,
Could someone please, give me a clarification over 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support in IT especially Database Administration?
Many thanks.
Regards,
Sahoong.
February 3, 2009 at 6:34 am
It's kind of intuitive once you understand it's just a support hierarchy.
1st level support is typically the person that answers the phone or email, but may be more customer service oriented, rather than having any programming or SQL experience. You've undoubtedly encountered this yourself, where they take notes, run thru a default set of diagnostics(is your computer turned on, did you log in, can you ping yahoo.com, no no a ping is a command in the black command window, not a little white ball...) all the easy questions get answered here.
2nd level support is someone more experienced to handle the questions that can't be fielded by the first level. their time is more valuable, so they only get called in for more difficult questions.
3rd level is basically the same, the most experienced guys with the most knowledge get called in when the 2nd tier guys can't handle the question involved.
Lowell
February 3, 2009 at 6:42 am
Hi Lowell,
Many thanks for your response. Its really helpful and you've been able to give me a detail clarification.
Once again, thanks.
Regards,
Sahoong.
February 4, 2009 at 9:00 am
Similar to Lowell's description, I've had this setup at 2 employers with a twist.
1st level is basic, replies heavily on documentation & flowcharts. These can be people from IT or other departments.
2nd level is function-specific experts. If 1st level thinks it's sales-related, they call the expert for sales. If for warehouse, they call the expert for warehousing. These are usually IT or sometimes an expert business user.
There may be a level 2(b), which is a separate technology expert for things like printing issues or network outages.
3rd level is the true deep expert that knows the big picture of business and technology and how they fit together, so they would know how sales data flows into warehouseing, they also know servers, databases, network, storage, etc. Only 2nd level gets to call 3rd level. Since this person is rare and most shops have only one, or 2 if really lucky, the calls 3rd level gets are real sticky problems that nobody else can solve, already screened by 2 previous levels.
One thing to add is that IT management gets notified (usually email, can be by phone depending on urgency and impact) anytime something is escalated to L2 or L3. If it's big enough to escalated, then:
1) They know about it to watch for a larger problem or trend, and
2) They can check if the L1 documentation should be updated for next time.
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