Application Maintenance and Support Service
Application Maintenance and Support Service
Many organizations in the past have implemented packaged solutions or custom-developed applications,and hybrid mixes of both kinds, without due diligence and requisite planning for how they will maintain and enhance the application across time. This trend, albeit in a reduced intensity, carries forward to the present.
Consequently, maintenance of applications that are spread across multiple platforms from legacy to client server systems to more recent multi-tier or browser-based architectures has continued to be a key, and often neglected, challenge for many global enterprises.
Application Management Services (AMS) provide ongoing functional and technical support for a company's application maintenance needs. A service provider's expertise in this area is determined by how well, and how consistently, it manages to stabilize, optimize and extend a client's application so that its functionality continues to meet the client's growing and changing needs.
Application support requires more than just technical knowledge. AMS delivery teams must combine excellent customer service skills, SLA-based service
management expertise, and critical business domain and functional knowledge along with relevant platform and technology skills. This combined skill mix
enables rapid problem resolution with increased business performance.
Due to the specialized skills required for effective AMS and the sustained high costs involved in maintaining in-house teams for the same, this area, for
most organizations, is perfectly positioned to be outsourced to the "right" offshore service provider a route that not only ensures consistent performance levels of existing applications, but increasing returns on application assets and sustained operational savings.
Application Maintenance: Types
Application Maintenance Services can be of various types, and various organizations choose to classify AMS in various different ways.Look at two broad classes of AMS based on the nature of the service need, each of which is further composed of two sub-classes:
1. AMS for Application Modifications (or Fixes) These are services provided on demand with an aim to fix' application functionality and performance. In turn, such service requests may originate because of either of two causes:
*Corrective Needs: When certain functional or technical glitches are identified in an application, or an application ecosystem, the AMS provider team needs to quickly narrow down and isolate the problem and rectify the same.
*Adaptive Needs: The platform OS, or underlying database, or hardware, or other IT
*systems on which an application sub-system is dependant on changes, there is a need to correspondingly modify certain aspects of the dependant
application(s).
2. AMS for Application Enhancements These are services provided on demand with an aim to improve application functionality and performance. In turn, such service requests may originate because of either of two causes:
*Improvement Needs: Based on user feedback, over time, certain improvement areas may be identified for an application, or an application ecosystem. The AMS provider team needs to provide services to build the requisite features/functionalities into the application(s).
* Preventive Needs: Even without any active improvement area identification from the user community, the forward-looking systems analysts need to identify mechanisms to ensure better performance, easier maintainability and higher reliability of critical applications.
The AMS provider needs to collaborate in such initiatives, and implement final recommendations for the same.
Service Level Aggrements
A company's success today is integrally linked with its information technology (IT) services. Any disruptions or degradations in IT service can cause serious, even catastrophic, damage to business.Considering the complexity and dynamic nature of today's enterprise applications and networks, it can be quite a challenge to achieve the high levels of service users requireand demand. Service Level Agreement, abbreviated SLA, is a formal contract between an AMS provider and the AMS serviceconsuming client that stipulates and commits the AMS provider to a required level of service.
An SLA typically defines a guaranteed level of system performance in terms of downtime or uptime, a specified level of customer support, a specified and measurable level of service guarantee (in terms of response and resolution times etc.), support options, enforcement or penalty provisions for services not provided.
The business needs for delivering such critical services are:
*Establish, track, and measure service level performance and distinguish priority situations
*Initiate proactive service level management by aligning IT services with business needs
*Ensure customer satisfaction by delivering the speed and quality of service level that customers expect
*Prevent miscommunication between IT and business about reasonable service levels for particular processes or types of business
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