Construct, Deliver and Maintain Systems Project:Maintenance and Support.

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Maintenance and Support

Maintenance involves both implementing the latest software versions of commercial packages and making in-house modifications to existing systems to accommodate changing user needs. Maintenance may be relatively trivial, such as modifying an application to produce a new report, or more extensive, such as programming new functionality into a system.

Some organizations view systems maintenance services as commodity activities that should be outsourced to third-party vendors on the low-cost bidder basis. The underlying justification for this is short-term economic benefit. By outsourcing maintenance and support, management can channel financial resources into the organization’s core competencies. Unfortunately, isolating maintenance activities from the organization also disrupts the flow of system-related knowledge that may be of strategic importance to the organization.

Some organizations take a strategic view of maintenance. Maintenance is an integral part of the SDLC. Rather than representing the end of the line, it can be an incubator for new ideas. If management captures the appropriate data, each currently running system can be the prototype for the next version. To ensure success, the organization needs to collect all relevant data from comments, requests, observed symptoms, and ideas for improvement from the user community.

USER SUPPORT

Typically, the first point of contact for such data transfer is through the user support function. This includes help desk services, user training and education classes, and formally documented user feedback pertaining to problems and system errors. To facilitate data gathering and analysis, knowledge management systems are effective maintenance tools.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND GROUP MEMORY

Knowledge management is a concept consisting of four basic processes: gathering, organizing, refining, and disseminating. Gathering brings data into the system. Organizing associates data items with subjects, giving them context. Refining adds value by discovering relationships between data, performing synthesis, and abstracting. Disseminating gets knowledge to the recipients in a usable form. The most difficult of these processes to automate is refining.

A knowledge management system can be used to create a group memory, which makes an organization more effective, just as human beings become more effective and mature with the accumulation of thoughts and memories. From a technology viewpoint, a knowledge management system is a database- oriented software tool that allows users, developers, and the operations community to contribute to the group memory. Contributors add their comments, suggestions, or complaints about a system or process into forms from their desktop PCs. The knowledge management software uses a parsing utility that takes incoming strings of data and infers relationships from them. A notable strength of the system is that it can deal with both historical and emerging data. The goal of the system is not simply to store information in a central repository for record keeping or archival recall. Rather, it analyzes the heterogeneous data and disseminates information to users and systems management. Group memory is thus a potentially valuable input to the organization’s evolving systems strategy.

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