This Redpaper provides recommendations for improving the support strategy for different WebSphere development groups within an organization. It is largely based on experiences gathered from delivering and implementing such a requirement with large corporations across various industries in several countries. The target for these recommendations are medium to large organizations (those that provide support to several groups), although smaller organizations will benefit as well from following some of the items discussed.

The approach described in this Redpaper includes proposing a way to structure the WebSphere support group, an explanation of the different personnel roles involved, how they fit into the recommended structure, and suggestions on raising WebSphere technical expertise throughout the organization. Examples of how this approach has been implemented in other large enterprises, and descriptions of what worked (as well as what did not work) are also given.

This document should be used as an aid in helping to craft the strategy, not as a description of the strategy itself (although it might be fairly similar). Note that this document is not specific to one platform, as we are not describing support for the actual WebSphere runtime operations; that is usually managed by a separate group (especially in historically more tightly-controlled platforms such as zSeries). The focus of this document is on application support.

Purpose and scope

Overview

Background

Solution

Roles

Staffing

Conclusion