computer care
This strategy is about acknowledging the realities of computer maintenance when making decisions about computer use. Computer software is a never finished product. As such, it's critical to not only consider the consequences of maintaining its use, but also to think about if and how you can be involved in its maintenance over time.
Most of the focus and enthusiasm for a new computer idea comes at the building stage, and many of the ideas for computer use get funded and sold before that building stage is even complete. Maintenance is the less glamorous and more important part of the equation. It is critical to understand how difficult it can be to remove the use of a computer program once a dependency on it has been created or normalized. The sale of many computer programs relies on the buyer or user not thinking this far out in time.
Some of the consequences of not paying attention to maintenance:
Computer maintenance and reputational exposure
When an organization is sold the use of a computer program the excitement of the new thing occurs before the long-term consequences are known or even processed. When this happens, there is major excitement around the launch of the new program, which ties the people making the decision to the success of their decision, reputationally, and makes it that much harder to reverse.
Computer maintenance and real-life operations
When a computer program moves into daily operations at an organization, it runs into the real world of people and their needs. If you are working with a computer and it acts differently than you need it to, do you have a path to follow to change it? In a lot of cases the answer is no. From there, people will start inventing ways to work around the computer, which gets increasingly unruly as time passes.
Computer maintenance and free computer use
The old saying goes that if the product is free you're the product. This can be extended into the consideration of how, exactly, you'll be paying to use this product over time. People get used to free products as consumers, and, increasingly, companies and organizations are getting offered the free use of computer programs. What is the cost? Why do the companies want to give the software away for free? Which kind of companies can afford to do this?
The maintenance of computers and computer programs is an easy to overlook piece of any decision about implementing computers. As you can imagine, you can't cut the ribbon on a maintenance funding decision, nor are well-maintained systems celebrated, they're only often noticed when they break. Which they will. Which is why paying attention to maintenance and consequences at the start of a discussion about computer use is a helpful strategy.