Figure 1 - Application lifecycle

At that time, there had been considerable research into software development, resulting in a number of development methodologies, some proprietary and others in the public domain. One common deficiency in the methodologies that were available was the lack of any detailed guidance on the operational stage of an IT service (sometimes called the support & maintenance phase) as shown to the right.

Yet it is this operational stage of the software/service lifecycle that:

• usually covers the greatest timespan;
• is when the customer business is dependent on the service and would be adversely impacted by poor service quality.

This is shown in Figure 2 which indicates that a service that may take 1 year to develop through to live implementation will typically have a minimum operational life of 4 to 6 years and perhaps considerably longer. Indeed, the author knows of one application in Australia that ran for over 36 years, albeit with significant enhancements over this time!

Figure 2 - Timespans of application lifecycles

It can be seen that the operational stage is the critical phase of the lifecycle and that failure to provide any guidance on managing this phase can result in unreliable, slow, and generally poor quality IT services. In the mid-1980s, the British Government’s Central Computer & Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) launched a major initiative to correct this lack of guidance. A project was established to discover what worked and didn’t work by tapping into organizations’ actual experiences. Although the CCTA was primarily concerned with the public sector, it was realized that government did not have a monopoly on good, or bad, ideas. It was important to involve the private sector in the project and also to look beyond the boundaries of the UK: to Europe and the USA.