Application Support and Maintenance

Earlier complex business processes were handled by handful of experienced people having flair in dealing complex processes but today business is highly dependent on IT Systems for day to day Operation. As business evolves, ongoing support, maintenance and enhancement of an organization’s products and applications poses a big challenge that organization faces. Thus Application Support and Maintenance are designed to enhance application efficiency, reduce down-time and extend applications life.

• Fixing errors 
  These are normal bugs or an error that pops out from time to time. This s is similar to "responding to production emergencies" 
  
  
• Application down
  When online or batch process crashes, it causes the application to stop and hampers the business. These problems must be addressed immediately and are usually classified at the highest severity level.

• Logical error
  These errors are much worse because here the application is still up, but generate erroneous results which affect the reliability of the application and results in bad decisions. Logical error or irrelevant results

• Assisting users and answering questions
  Business processes run on application software. When the application users have certain questions or queries, they have no choice but to ask the support team for help. This category can take up a lot of time in your organization.

• Responding to environment changes
  This Category deals with responding to changes like migrating the operating system , hardware upgrades and changes ,Testing , upgrading from Microsoft Office 98 to Office 2000, or adding more memory to your client's workstation ,addition of new plug ins . Nonetheless, action is required from the support team to make sure that the applications remain stable and accurate.

• Trivial software/hardware upgrades and changesTrivial changes are the small changes initiated by the internal teams unlike the prior category. 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.

• Assisting with business processes
  In many organizations there are business processes that occur on the regular basis. A good example is the financial closeout process that occurs in companies on a monthly basis. 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.

• Documentation updates
  Updating system, or support documentation

• Other
  This category includes work done by the support team but is not directly related to the applications.e.g For example, support teams need to create status report on a monthly basis or  need to spend time cross training with other members.

The application support function is imperative to every company. There is no doubt that support team plays a critical role in ensuring that the company business processes function reliably and correctly. Surveys of IT spending indicate that organizations spend more on cost to maintain current IT functionality and operations. Therefore, it is important that organizations control the cost of IT management and application maintenance in order to free resources for development of new functionality.

About Author:

Mohini Bhandari is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at mohini.b@spluspl.com