The Purpose of Production Support

What's the purpose of Production Support? The answer to that question will serve as our guideline for the rest of the topics in this Blog. With this entry, I'll look to provide an answer to that question by condensing various points into a single statement (that answers the question).

Most Production Support analysts and managers easily recognize that the main reason behind the systems they support is to enable business. Yet, all too easily, a system-centric focus is still maintained and, worse, we manage to that. At the end of the day though, you could have the most stable system in the world, but if it doesn't enable business, it's really worthless.

The second point follows from the first. In order to enable business, the systems must be available to the business user. Availability also implies that everything that the user needs from the system is ready. For example, if a business user needs certain data before she can execute transactions on the system, if the data is not there, the system is not truly available. So, despite the sytem being up, despite all its interfaces being connected, if the user cannot perform a transaction because something is missing, then the system isn't available (at least not 100%). The user could potentially enter a transaction, but she would be doing so blindly - which implies risk.

Another way to view Production Support is as risk management, which follows from the second point. Production Support is a form of insurance that the business pays to enable their business. We know perfect systems are rather impossible to achieve (at least at the speed with which our businesses move). So Production Support is there to proactively mitigate the risk of something going wrong. When things do go wrong, based on what we've already said, the job of Production Support is to recover the systems from outages to enable business.

Finally, we have to have manage to a target. The level of contractual performance must be pre-arranged. Thus, we arrive at an availability target, which is expressed as a percentage of system uptime. Note that uptime and availability are not the same. As explained before, a system might be up, but not available (the data is missing). Many organizations establish a target of 3-9's (99.9%) or better (5-9's 99.999%). Of course any target that makes sense and will meet the goals of the business is acceptable as long it's pre-arranged contractually - with the business.

We can simply say then, that:

The Purpose of Production Support is to maintain System Availability, at a target level, which will enable the business user to achieve their goals.

You'll notice that other sites give us some insight into the importance of Production Support as well as some of its processes (e.g. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_support). But you'll note that they don't attempt to answer the question of purpose. We'll cover many of these activities (and more) in a bit more depth, but it's important to keep in mind why a Production Support team is even needed.