THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

Organizational demographics is proposed as a promising analytic technique for understanding a central problem of information systems (IS) management, the problem of the maintenance of the application system portfolio. This problem is viewed as occurring in significant part as a consequence of the effects and interaction among distributions of individual characteristics of both the application systems and the members of the IS staff. To examine this proposition, a sample of eighteen\u27IS organizations is described in demographic terms, and regression equations are developed to explain variance in maintenance problems associated with the installed portfolios. The results provide support for the proposition, with implications for management and for further research