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Value of Application Knowledge Capture

Improved Application Support

Application Knowledge Capture improves the results delivered from the IT support organizations by:

  • Dramatically improving recall and use of critical application information while providing a structure and mechanism for maintaining this knowledge
  • Enabling performance improvement and/or cost reduction by reducing the time to resolve problems which have a history of recurring and whose solution has already been determined
  • Consider Application Knowledge as a Business Asset.  For example, how does a company:
    • Prevent outages and loss of service
    • Support strategic initiatives by redeploying key knowledge workers
    • Protect the corporate knowledge assets
    • Improve service
    • Conduct IT / User training
    • Insure that key application components and reports are visible and understood
    • Standardize methodology and tools to capture and deploy critical application knowledge throughout the organization
    • Insure knowledge retention where most application knowledge resides within the minds of employees and contractors

Knowledge Investment

Protecting IT application knowledge investment is a critical responsibility because companies face the potential for loss of service, costly re-creation of information and expensive training due to:

  • Strategic Issues
    • Aging, complex, modified, unique software
    • Many companies face loss through retirement, redeployment of key knowledge workers, costly re-creation of information and expensive training of replacements
  • Support Issues
    • Lack of process in Application Support which, in many cases, is still primarily reactive
    • Incomplete or non-existent application documentation
    • Knowledge residing with individuals and contractors, instead of being institutionalized within the IT Department
  • Human Resource Issues
    • Departure of Experts:  those with critical knowledge may soon leave
    • High usage of contractors that have limited long term commitment to the organization.
    • Disproportionate amount of IT staff time is occupied with Legacy Support, not new Strategic initiatives
  • Critical Threat
    • Off-shore outsourcing of Application Support

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IT Support Services Comments

  • Bob Anderson: Daniel, from a certain point of view you are correct. CMMI- DEV deals primarily with software development best practices, the old CMM Level-5 dealt a great deal with defects. However, as you know the ...
  • Bob Anderson: Gunter, there are many possible SLA components and metrics that can be defined for any application software support. First I would recommend that you read this article which I had published in Compute...
  • Bob Anderson: Amiet, I would put it under the "Incident" process and track dates, number of occurrences, how much lost time, cause (who did it). You will need data for management if the practice has to stop. If you...
  • Bob Anderson: Amit, first of all why is the customer powering down the equipment? This should be brought to the attention of management and a very strong note sent to whoever is doing this.  If they are doing it on...
  • Bob Anderson: Mark, it is doubtful that you can fix the problem, it is mainly a management issue. The best you can do is to gather statistics on the backlog of enhancements, the number and severity of incidents, an...

ITIL V3 Application Support Q & A

If you have any question on the blog content or have some specific question on how ITSM & ITIL can dramatically improve performance and reduce the cost of your Application Support service "Ask Bob"
Question :
Hi Bob, Since I have make a control of doubts from our dealers questions, that uses our SW, is possible to see evaluation of our intern SLA. Me question is: I find only three metrics using to compare months to months our evolaution: error programs, legislation, improvem...
Answer :
Gunter, there are many possible SLA components and metrics that can be defined for any application software support. First I would recommend that you read this article which I had published in Computer World on "How to create Meaningful IT Support SLA's"  use this link...
Question :
In your answer to "Question : bugs, known errors and kb articles". You refer to CMMI-DEV and talk about defects and say that CMMI-DEV is for software development and does not deal with operations. So, is that another way of saying that CMMI-DEV ignores operations? Isn't...
Answer :
Daniel, from a certain point of view you are correct. CMMI- DEV deals primarily with software development best practices, the old CMM Level-5 dealt a great deal with defects. However, as you know the folks who developed the original CMM  were not really initially inter...
Question :
Hi Bob, Continuing on the question i posted yesterday. I understand your comment and we have actually done that. It is a reactive approach and we now want to move to a praoctive approach and want to understand if these activities should be managed under the change proce...
Answer :
Amiet, I would put it under the "Incident" process and track dates, number of occurrences, how much lost time, cause (who did it). You will need data for management if the practice has to stop. If you want to be "proactive" in stopping this practice" you must capture bu...
Question :
The chaos in applicaiton support in my company is in part due to the limited resources assigned to aging applications and very little documentation. How do I suggest that we need help?
Answer :
Mark, it is doubtful that you can fix the problem, it is mainly a management issue. The best you can do is to gather statistics on the backlog of enhancements, the number and severity of incidents, and how many technical support calls from users you get and the average...
Question :
If a customer is powering down equipment at his site and it will bring down the services during that time, should this be recorded as a change. You will not have any control over this activity and this activity is managed by the customer himself. These activities may ha...
Answer :
Amit, first of all why is the customer powering down the equipment? This should be brought to the attention of management and a very strong note sent to whoever is doing this.  If they are doing it on their own without any instruction to do so and it affects other user...

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