What is Application Support and Maintenance Service

What is application support and maintenance service? What are the attributes required for support analyst job?

Let us first understand Application Support (Application Management services) delivered in an organization.

Application support and Maintenance service: Also known as Production Support delivered in an organization for the custom application. Employees of the organization use the application to execute their business process. The organization will set up the application support center. It can also outsource the support service to a vendor who will form the application support team.

In Managed IT services job, Application Support Analysts should have functional and technical understanding about the application and most important, its business process.

Application support provided for the applications in production (an application hosted and live in a physical place). Depending on the kind of issues reported, Support analyst handles it quickly and efficiently as any delay can cause productivity loss for the user and revenue loss for the company.

What are the attributes required for an Application Support analyst job?

• Skills to communicate and understand:

  The Support Analysts must have the skills to communicate effectively with the end-user and understand the problem they face. This can help in better diagnosis and resolution of the reported issue. This also gives confidence to the end-user that his issue has been well understood by Support analyst and resolution is on the way.

• Business Process:

  The Support Analysts should have a good understanding about business process which gets automated through the supported application and business software. Internal business analyst course gets conducted for the application engineer or analyst programmer.

• Accountability:

  The Support Analysts handling the ticket must understand the accountability he has for the ticket closure. Support Analyst should take ownership and take the support ticket to closure with his understanding, technical skills and escalating it to the next level if required.

• Technical analysis and investigative skill:

  The Support Analysts must have required technical skills (programming language e.g. Java, .NET & the Database (Oracle, SQL Server) knowledge). To drill down to the cause of the reported issue starting from the user interface to the levels deep to data storage and any inbound/outbound interfaces. Support Analyst should have skill set to understand the business logic written by software developer during application development. Knowledge of the business functionality flow of the application module. Bugs and performance issues found by testing software reported to IT Support services permanent fix.

• Understanding of Application Support service:

  Support Analyst should have the understanding of Support service and its functionality. e.g. turnaround time of different priority tickets, timely acknowledgement, proper categorization of tickets for future analysis and re-prioritization based on impact, urgency and priority. Understanding of ITIL Application management process could be added advantage. IT Support services use project management applications. There are ticketing tools to manage support tickets and RFC (request for change) and releases.

Application Support service delivery process:

Next: Detail (Application Support Service delivery process)