In my company it is the job of someone in business technology to manage production applications. Personally I think that this is a job for a Project Manager, not a developer, as it is about management and is not particularly technical. You do not actually have to carry out any of the work on the application, just:
- Manage the relationship with the vendor
- Manage the infrastructure teams to keep the application running
- Manage all issues and problems with the application
- Manage any updates to the application
- Manage all access to the production system
- Manage any documentation for the system and its operation
- Manage SOX audits on applications that require it
This is no small task and incorporates only part of my job. When everything is well, there is little to do, but as usual everything happens at once.
I currently own:
- Our general ledger application (soon to be decommissioned)
- All of our Mortgage Souring systems (around six applications)
- Visual Studio Team System (includes Team Explorer, Web Access to Team System, Office Integration, )
- a CRM that I built
- and a few others
I am performing a SOX audit on our general ledger application and all of our Mortgage Sourcing application have stopped working due mainly to the way they are built being incompatible with our infrastructure.
Fixing these problems, or managing the solutions is slow and painfully. At least my company has just implemented a SOX audit management system that is taking the audit from two months last year to only a few weeks this year.