Why does computer maintenance take so much time? Why are computers systems down for so long when they fail?

Computer systems inevitably fail, but you can minimize the costs, and reduce workstation down time to hours instead of days if you fully apply these strategic principles in your computer support operation.

Christmas Past

First it was punch cards - one card per line of programming that could be entered into the OS/360 mainframe at the rate of about 7 cards per minute. Then it was paper tape and pricey pizza pan sized hard drives that fed machines with system names like ¨RT-11¨, ¨PDP-8¨´ ¨RSTS¨.

Next came the era of TSO, mainframe virtual machines (VM/CMS), and drives the size of large cake platters that held a whopping 200 megabytes. Along came GE timeshare, MCI mail, Compuserve, and the legendary VAX/VMS.

Most people have called a support, or ´Help Desk´ and they know that the better ones make a record of each customer contact in a ticketing system.

Tickets are more than automated  ´called while you were out´ systems. On top of reliable ticketing software is the ticketing ´design´. Service work by nature has many intangible qualities. A good ticketing design is what makes the efforts of a service operation visible, measurable and measurable.

An IT organization can purchase ticketing software on the basis of reliability, scalability, robustness, support and price. The ticket design, however needs to be created in coordination with the operational design for the service business, and modified when the business changes.

The heart of the ticket design is often called ´CTI´ - category, type and item classification. Tickets are classified for many reasons, including: accountability, service assignment and ticket routing, and metrics.

The control knob was set on position '4' and taped. "What does it do?", I asked a supervisor.

"Don't exactly know", he said. "It has something to do with the product thickness control system. Some pretty smart folks must have figured out that '4' was right. I was told not to touch it!"

If this sounds like your facility, let me tell you what comes next. In a month, or a year, maintenance will finally remove this bit of technology and automation. They will say that it is justified because no one uses it, and that the continued maintenance costs should be saved now that times are tough.