RSSUsing fragile support to reduce costs in the downturn
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I've discussed, in passing, the concept of "fragile support" here before. If ever were there a time to investigate this idea more fully on your end, it's now.
Fragile support is a method of shifting IT department resources toward preventing, rather than resolving, certain systemic types of issues which are heavy support request generators. This may sound as if it contradicts almost exactly the concept of Agile Operations which I outlined earlier this week (which calls for the acceptance of support issues as inevitable in operations and requires the IT organization spend less time making futile attempts to prevent them and devote more resources toward resolving them rapidly) and in some ways it does… think of them as the yin and the yang of the modern IT organization, two fundamentally opposed concepts with which we must strive for balance rather than competition. But fragile support is oriented more toward diminishing the impact of certain types of problems on the organization than attempting to eliminate them entirely. Traditional support is a lose/lose affair for the enterprise; an end-user is losing time because of the error, and an IT staffer is losing time diagnosing and correcting it. Fragile support is a sort of judo which can allow you to avoid that cyclic pit of despair with respect to certain systemic problems in the average procurement and support model.
Once again, for copyright reasons, the full text of this post is only available on my other blog. Go check it out.
