A study of development and maintenance in Norway: assessing the efficiency of information systems support using functional maintenance

摘要

The large amount of work on information systems being taken up by maintenance activities has been one of the arguments of those speaking about a "software crisis'. We have investigated the applicability of this statement, and propose instead to look at the percentage of work being done on functional maintenance to assess the efficiency of the information systems support in an organisation. This paper presents the main results from a survey investigation performed in Norwegian organisations within the area of software development and maintenance. The results are based on responses from 53 Norwegian organisations. The investigation is compared with other investigations, both those performed in Norway where a similar investigation was conducted in 1994 and investigations performed in other countries. Similar to the investigation from 1994, the situation is better when looking at the situation from a functional point of view rather than using the traditional maintenance measures. Somewhat surprisingly, the amount of both traditional and functional maintenance work are significantly higher than in the similar investigation done five years earlier. It is also significantly higher than what was found in earlier investigations carried out in the USA and in other countries. One reason for this seems to be the extra maintenance and replacement-oriented work necessary to deal with the Y2K-problem. Even when considering this, too much of the scarce IT-personnel spent their time on tasks that do not add value for the users of the systems.