Services Provided by Application Support

In early stages, all the business processes of an Organization were managed manually or on excel by a handful of people who have been working with the organization for a substantial time. Due to continuous business expansion the data and processes became more complex and hence were managed by continuously evolving IT technology comprising of Hardware and Software applications.

However, as Human beings are prone to make mistakes even Application (Hardware and Software) are susceptible to errors. Thus, every organization must have an application support team to ensure that the application run smoothly, successfully and without any error.

For a Successful and efficient functioning of an application an alert and efficient support team is required. Along with good features of the application after implementation, application support is equally important for its success. Efficient and prompt application support helps the application to earn a good brand name in the Industry.

The overall perception of the Business users and Non-IT people is that the Application support team only fixes errors and nothing else. This perception is incorrect.

The Application support staff provides a number of services and undertakes many responsibilities apart from fixing errors. Listed below are the details of the services undertaken by Application Support Team:

1. Application Monitoring: Under this service the application support team continuously monitors the Application to check whether the application is always up and running smoothly. Also the application support team alerts the business users if by any chance the application is going to be down and takes the required actions so that there is no data loss and minimum delay or loss of time as there are many users who rely on the same application which is not working any more due to crash commonly called as application down. These problems are typically classified at the highest severity level and can be controlled by consistent and efficient application monitoring.
2. Fixing errors:  Fixing errors is similar to the "responding to production emergencies", however the severity level is not as great. This category includes the "normal" bugs and errors that pop up from time to time. For instance, a batch job that goes down may just need to be resubmitted. Another example is an error that occurs on an online screen that may not occur the next time it runs or if the page is reloaded. Or a report may print asterisks in a field that is not large enough to hold the entire value. All of these are examples of fixing errors that do not rise to the level of a production emergency.
3. Assisting users and Training: The broad category of assisting users/answering questions can take up a lot of time in your organization. Business processes run on application software. When the application users have certain queries, in many cases they have no choice but to ask the support team for help. After all, in many cases, the code is the ultimate source for understanding how certain processes work. When new users come on board they are not familiar with the response of the application to different scenarios and conditions, they may need assistance from the support staff to understand how the application works. Examples for this category include researching why certain financial transactions are kicking out of the application, performing research to understand the extract criteria for a report, and determining why a certain sequence of screen input results in a certain outcome.
4. Responding to environment changes: Sometimes events take place that require changes to an application, or testing, which are not caused due to any error. For example, you may have a client-server application that runs on Windows XP. Your company may decide to upgrade operating systems to Windows 8. This may require you to run tests on your applications to make sure that they still process correctly using the new operating system. Another example is the implementation of software that automatically compresses e-mail attachments. These are examples of changes that take place in the general processing environment in which your applications run. Neither you nor your client initiated a change. Nevertheless, action is required from the support team to ensure that the applications remain stable and accurate.
5. Trivial software/hardware upgrades and changes: This category of service dealing with trivial software/hardware upgrades and changes is similar to the prior category of responding to environment changes. The difference is that the prior category assumes that you need to react to changes in the environment changes that are initiated by others. This category covers services involved when your team initiates the changes. Notice that the category title specifies "trivial". The point of including this word is that the changes or upgrades must be small. For instance, a trivial change may be as simple as upgrading from Microsoft Office 98 to Office 2000, or adding more memory to your client's workstation. If the work is nontrivial, then it should be classified as an enhancement. If it is a large enough effort, you may even organize the work into a project.
6. Assisting with business processes: In many organizations there are business processes that take place on a regularly scheduled basis. A good example is the financial closeout process that occurs in companies on a monthly basis. Most companies close the books on a monthly basis, and may have additional special processing that takes place on a quarter-end and at year-end. These processes rely on computer applications, which in turn rely on the support staff. Normal and ongoing assistance with these business processes is part of the service provided by the support staff.
7. Documentation updates: Compiling documentation updates includes the time associated with updating system, user, or support documentation. Like other categories, this represents the time associated with minor updates. Since documentation updates are normally not time sensitive, anything over five hours of work would be a discretionary request, instead of support.
8. Other: There are other types of work that the support teams do that are not directly related to the applications. For instance, support teams need to communicate effectively and may be creating a status report on a monthly basis. Support team members also need to spend time on cross training with other members so that each application has at least two people who understand it.

Application support team does not only work on resolving errors but on various other services for smooth and efficient functioning of the application. Application support team fulfills various other responsibilities which directly or indirectly effect successful functioning of the application.

About Author:

Amol Bhembre is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: amol.b@spluspl.com