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When an organisation uses IT within its company there are issues that arise that they will have to consider when they are planning computer systems maintenance.

The first issue that you may come across is downtime. The organisation has to consider how long the system, computer or whatever it is will be inoperable for, this is because the rest of the business will be unable to use these systems  which means they will be losing productivity and therefore money.  So the organisation will either (1) have to make the maintenance as quick and timely as possible as not to cause much production loss or (2) make the maintenance happen outside of normal business hours.

The second issue that will have to be considered is whether the planning of the maintenance is necessary or not enough to justify the loss in production because if it’s only something that isn’t really needed then there is no point in maintaining it, because it’s simply not worth it.

The third issue that you will have to consider is the safety and safety at work act for planning of IT maintenance. For example could the IT support fix the problem safely without any tools such as fixing a software issue or it could have a hardware issue that could require special tools to stay safe such as static bands and correct tools. This is very important to comply with the health and safety at work act because it will help to ensure your workers and users health and safety. Another point is to make sure that all of the staff have the necessary training. This important because it I allows them to operate efficiently and safely when performing maintenance on the systems or computers as well as giving the staff the capability to obey the Health and safety at work act making things faster and more seamless.

One more thing that an organisation would have to consider while planning performing maintenance is the security of the said maintenance. For example, if you are upgrading the firmware for the security cameras in your organisations buildings the cameras will be out of order until the maintenance is completed.

Another issue that you would have to consider is the local laws and county wide laws of your respective state and governments. This will include many laws such as the data protection act which would mean that you have to make sure that you will comply with keeping all of the user’s information safe and secure and having preventative measures for security risks.

Another issue that you would have to consider when planning IT maintenance is to identify and comply with all of the staff rotas and time tables. This means that you’re making sure that the maintenance for things like hardware will occur the same time that the Hardware Maintenance guy is working this is also true with software and the software guy.

Policies and procedures to control the maintenance of computer systems are a necessity within IT support these days for a number of reasons, for which I will explain below.

The first reason that we need policies and procedures when performing computer maintenance is for health and safety. This makes sure that all of your staff members are staying safe and following all the correct procedures, this will mean that they won’t hurt themselves causing your company to save money and keep business.

The second reason for this is that policies and procedures control the way you perform computer maintenance is because it will protect your company or organisation and all its staff from being liable for damage because they haven’t followed correct procedure and have gotten something wrong, whereas if you follow procedure correctly then nothing should go wrong at all.

The Third reason that policies and procedures are used to control the Maintenance of computer systems is security. security is a crucial for when maintaining computer systems. this is because a good security system will help to prevent breakages and other issues with the computer, where as if your computer system has bad security, the maintenance you perform for example; malware removal . would be pointless , because the malware could get onto the system easily again. To stop this from happening you would need to ensure that you have good security measures in place. for example using antivirus software such as AVAST, AVG or microsoft security essentials. and as an added bonus, these programs can perform maintenance automatically so you don't have to!

The final reason Policies and Procedures are used to control the maintenance of computer systems is prioritisation. Prioritisation ensures that you give computer maintenance to those who, either need it most or have the most money. this is so that the IT support can focus on the most on some issues, if they need to be solved faster for example if the computers in an exam went down then it would be a high priority, whereas if something cant print then its a low priority. This prioritisation method allows you to organise in a strategic manner how to get tasks done.