IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

5.7. Maintenance – letting go of the M-word

Outside of the IT industry, maintenance refers to the upkeep of finished products to ensure they continue to work properly, don't jeopardize safety and don't age prematurely. For example, cars are serviced every so many miles or km, houses and buildings are repainted and cleaned at regular intervals and commercial airplanes are stripped to an unrecognizable state every few years for an exhaustive inspection of the complete mechanical structure. The key words are 'upkeep' and 'finished product'. Maintenance is not about changing the product or correcting its shortcomings – these would be called enhancements, e.g. renovating the attic to turn it into a bedroom, or building a stretched version of a commercial airliner to accommodate more passengers.

As explained earlier in this chapter, the traditional IT business model uses the term maintenance in a negative sense to refer to corrections and rework once the first version has been delivered. So the sum total of the maintenance backlog in any IT organization refers to the sum of all the projects which made it to production, but were somehow unsuccessful or incomplete, and subsequently have to be revisited.

Under the new model, however, it is an accepted fact of life that it is impossible to correctly and fully specify business requirements for software, so there will always be 'rework' and 'corrections'. This will be based on a combination of planned and unplanned demand (the distinction ...