DAA’s core mission is assisting our customer’s
successes in automating sales, engineering and
manufacturing work order processes. The scope of
automated functionality is dictated by customer
business objectives. As these business objectives
continually change, so must the supporting KBE
systems.
KBE systems have natural life cycle steps. Every
automated business process (KBE system) that is
expected to provide
continued returns must go
through the three steps of (1) Opportunity
Identification & Qualification, (2) System Design
and Implementation and (3) System
Maintenance.
As the scope of this discussion is step 3, let’s
take a closer look at what this step involves and
the two main approaches in which system
maintenance
can be approached.
Specifically, system maintenance is the process of
updating and changing a successfully implemented
KBE
system in order to sustain its associated business
benefits. The need for system change is driven by
the following factors:
- Changes in the underlying business process that
has been automated
- Changes in the system’s user requirements
- Changes in the consumer’s output
requirements
- Changes in the software products used to
construct
the system
- Correction of various system problems and
bugs.
The requirement to address these items begins
immediately after initial system
implementation. Understanding and accepting this
business reality and the need for maintenance is
rarely disputed by KBE system users. The issue that
can arise regards how the process of maintenance is
approached. Over the years, DAA has seen two
distinctly different approaches; the first generally
leading to ongoing project success and the second
generally leading to problems.
Annual Application Maintenance
Annual Application Maintenance involves an
efficient, well planned process and approach
to system maintenance. Annual Application
Maintenance provides the following benefits:
- Keeps the system continually at 100% usefulness
and avoids user frustration.
- Minimizes the effort in getting enhancements
implemented.
- Enables planning and implementation of changes in
an efficient and forward looking way from both cost
and resource availability perspectives,
- Leverages the capabilities of the technologies
used in the automated system to a maximum
degree,
- Minimizes overall system cost
In addition to the Annual Application Maintenance
providing these benefits, it avoids the negative
issues associated with the Bundling approach as
discussed below.
Bundling
The second, and least effective, method of system
maintenance is referred to as “Bundling”. Bundling
is the
accumulation of multiple change
requests over a period of time, sometimes years,
followed by discrete upgrade events. The
concept is that when the bundle is big enough, the
changes can be implemented through a discrete
upgrade event. This concept also presumes that
these discrete upgrade events can be repeated each
time a bundle of sufficient size accumulates.
Although this approach may seem simple, attractive
and effective, a decade of experience has shown that
saving-up bundles of issues for periodic upgrade
events most frequently leads to system failure with
the KBE customer…
- experiencing a continual erosion of application
usefulness and increasing manual labor costs (“slow
walk” back to the manual process which the system
was initially created to replace.),
- becoming frustrated by system limitations while
waiting for the bundle to grow to an “appropriate”
size for implementation,
- finds they are unable to secure funding for their
latest “bundle” as they find themselves at the mercy
of ever changing spending constraints and
justification criteria,
The above list is a
small sample of the
very real frustrations that inevitably occur
with the “bundling” approach. It has been DAA’s
repeated experience that these frustrations
eventually lead to applications reaching end-of-life
within 3-5 years after initial implementation with
corresponding loss of the initial investment.
In summary, the Annual Application Maintenance
approach is an integral part of DAA’s business
model. The above items are a
small sample of
the
very real benefits that all KBE users’
can enjoy. Please call DAA is you would like to get
further information on this powerful and cost
effective method of system maintenance.
Learn more...
