Mark predicts a critical role for support as it comes out of the shadows of the traditional fix-on-fail IT support and is recognised as the route to system evolution.
The rush by firms to establish a presence on the Internet has challenged the traditional model for systems support. Central IT departments are often well equipped to handle infrastructure related issues at a help desk, first level and even a second application-specific level. But beyond that, organizations normally call in the software authors or specialist support suppliers. Internet enabled applications – particularly those focused on end customer interaction – require a different approach, although the fundamentals may be the same.
In traditional business application areas such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), customers often expect a full systems support capability, for a number of commercial and technical reasons, many of which have parallels in Broadvision application environments. These are things like; a need to know exactly how much support will cost; knowing precisely what sort of service levels can be expected; knowing there will never be a skills or resource shortage; having a means of isolating support from other activities. All of these reasons for using external support services remain valid in most outsourced support situations, but there are some important differences in the BroadVision world that make outsourcing support an even more compelling business case. Let’s look at some of these from two perspectives: first from the business users point of view and secondly from the IT systems support angle.
Business users
Business users only value applications if they feel comfortable using them and experience that their lives are made easier – not more difficult – through the use of these systems. In addition, they want systems to be working 100% of the time and at 100% efficiency. They don’t expect or want systems down-time while they are using the applications. So, besides the basics of keeping business users properly trained, from a support perspective there are the issues of content management, systems usage and managing simple modifications to ensure maximum effectiveness and productivity can be maintained. Support can play a lead role in handling these daily tasks as well as the longer term or more strategic areas of functionality and customer preferences by providing skilled resource to work alongside the business users.
IT systems management
Ideally, the commissioning IT management function would prefer to have dedicated resource, with its own change control and problem management processes. This support function should also perhaps be able to manage relationships with other third party software and systems providers, handling the whole process of deploying enhancements, as well as addressing the planning and implementation of step changes, upgrades and roll-out. Here the traditional support model is often extended to cover not just fixes and enhancements but also the evolution of the system to meet changing business needs. Having the support function play a role in this area could greatly improve a business’s agility – or its ability to respond to changing customer and market needs.
What Model?
Over the past six years Axon has spent a lot of time supporting large ERP system users who face similarly demanding business needs to Broadvision users. We believe much of what we’ve learned over this period might apply to E-commerce environments as well as core ERP. However, we also recognize there are some basic differences which vary from customer to customer.
A start point of a standalone support operation, which only does fixes and problem solving, is probably not the optimum use of resources. It’s also unlikely to provide a sustainable value-add solution, unless you have an extremely large scale operation. A preferred three-tiered model combines primary problem solving, enhancements and upgrades along with evolutionary planning. This way the support operation becomes a visible value-add component of the whole infrastructure, contributing to business needs in a tangible and productive way.
