No source code means no support
David Levy
Maybe looking for interesting, part-time work as an independent consultant performing IT Risk, Data Protection, Privacy and/or Data Administration roles. I have chosen not to verify for privacy reasons.
Much thought has been given to the issue of how to support IT. While it’s been a while since I have looked at the ITIL process model, incident/problem management remains at the core of what is now called Service Operations.
Service operations requests are usually organised in three classes of response, referred to as levels, from first to third. The 1st level is usually a call routing response allowing the help desk to meet its service level response agreements. The 2nd level should be equipped to support many, or most service desk requests, and 3rd level mainly to deal with complex requests or bug resolution.
When dealing with software, an essential tool for diagnostics is the privilege to read the source code while responding with a fix may require the privilege and authority to amend the product.
While at Sun Microsystems, I was advised by some of the most senior support managers that they would not support a software product unless they could refer issues to people who could fix the code. I also negotiated with customer support managers who developed their support strategies with a similar backstop. To use software, most regulators say it must be supported and to support software, you must have source code rights to fix bugs.
In the case of proprietary software, the vendors offer support contracts. Corporate incident management processes should mandate the use of these support contracts. Internal third line support will not usually have access to source code engineering privilege, but they must have the ability to refer service requests to the product author or their adequately trained, authorised service partners with this privilege.
Sun Microsystems signed various engineering support agreements allowing reciprocal call sharing/routing and in some cases joint source code access to ensure that it could support its full portfolio of customer commitments. (It was at times a huge frustration to both me and my customers that while we could be clever in offering integration projects, engineering a support solution was often harder than the technology solutions design.) These joint agreements were critical as one axiom of this deep support, is that publisher of the error message, is the first place to contact, although the bug may be somewhere else.