viii Acknowledgments Special thanks to the following people for their insights, expertise, and contributions. They have developed, redeveloped, managed, and are still managing service centers, and they understand what it takes to build and run a world-class service center. Their hard work has benefited all of us. To Wayne Markover and Anthony Tuorto for taking me into the trenches and sharing their expertise during the hectic D2k upgrade and service center upgrade. I couldn't have done this without them (and they're not bad, guys either)! See you in Montana. To Harris Kern for the insight, opportunity, and friendship. I look for-ward to a future journey. To Tom Shumacher, consultant extraordinaire, who just completed the rebuilding and retooling of a huge service center, where broadcast is king and downtime is unacceptable. I suppose those 10,000 external customers and the millions of people who rely on the information they receive are pretty important too. To Stephanie Jason for sharing her expertise and taking the time to tell me about her past and present help desks and the plans for the future. To Alan Dettmering and George Saulnier. They have recently built and are now operating one of the finest service centers around. Their unique approach to tier 1 staffing has been successful and could be the model for the future. Who would have guessed that tier 2 resources would consider it desirable to make it to tier 1? I hear they have a fan-tastic resource-loading model that they might be willing to share.