IT Application Support – Key Challenges

Today more and more organizations understand the importance of IT Applications in an enterprise and are also adopting cutting edge technology to enhance their capability and efficiency. These applications are able to handle all of the complex business processes which traditionally could be handled only by experienced and qualified professionals. However as with all other aspects of technology, the systems also susceptible to downtime and thus IT Application support team plays an important role in making sure that the applications run smoothly and are error free. As the systems are getting more complex and critical to business, it has become necessary that the support staff has detailed knowledge of the system and various business processes involved. The support staff should be able to resolve complex issue in a short period of time. This may increase the learning curve in terms of time for a person to understand the application functioning and acquire an in-depth understanding of the same.

Mentioned below are some of the key challenges faced by a support team:

• Little/No Management attention: Most of the business priorities are focused on the strategic projects and thus very less effort of management is on support activities unless there is an outage. This leads to inefficiencies creeping in and increased risk in long run.
• Prioritization: Finding right balance between variable demand of Incident Resolution and scheduled support activities. Support team needs to make sure that the backlog is not ignored and requests are responded as per the right priority at all times.
• Lack of documentation: Documentation provided by application development team in the form of User guides/System specification, are rarely updated to reflect the changes that the system has undergone. This results in high dependency on the existing teams and difficult transition due to the undocumented knowledge. Also solutions for many of the recurring problems are not documented, resulting in duplication of efforts
• Quick fix: In the desperation of quickly resolving the issues in hand, the support team misses the big picture and might resort to quick fixes that may result in further creating more problems
• Wasteful cost: This is a result of the previous aspect. Instead of finding a permanent fix to recurring problems, support team needs to keep responding to the same problem each time. This increases wasteful cost.
• Lack of right process and communication: Too many channels of communications and lack of appropriate process definition results in reactive approach by the support team that might result in missing out on critical/priority issues and increases backlog.
• Finding right resource: Due to the expertise required by the support staff, and the amount of pre-training required, it is difficult to replace/redeploy them. Thus providing less flexibility to staff, adds cost and increase waste.
• Handle peaks: Due to erratic nature of support activities, at times there are peaks in the problems that might lead to increase in backlog and other times there are lull period that might leave the team under-utilized.
• Longer learning curve: Keeping in mind the advancement technology has made and the complexity of business, IT support staff training would be longer as compared to traditional support. This learning curve is not recognized as business demands increase for quick responses and tickets for support increase.

Application support and maintenance is as important as any other IT Project in an organization to ensure that all the applications perform to their best and deliver what is expected out of them without any disruption.

About Author:

Harsh Saraogi is consultant and part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He is a part of consulting team that delivers Sourcing and Vendor Management Office projects. He can be contacted at: harshvardhan.s@spluspl.com