Janus Boye recently proposed that you cancel your maintenance contracts in order to save money. But before you think of this as a great money-spinner, there are a number of key issues you must consider.

• Many maintenance contracts are tied into the licence agreement; cancel your maintenance and you lose the right to use the software. In this case, the vendor may not sue you, but how honest would you be in denying the company its cash?
• If something goes seriously wrong with the core product — you discover a security flaw or an issue with the schema — then how do you fix it? Third parties will be extremely reluctant to fix this and any changes to the core product are likely to make re-entering support (when upgrading, for example) extremely complex. We’re talking low likelihood, high impact risks. The question is, do you want to tolerate these or transfer them to someone else?
• A good relationship with the vendor is still preferable to a poor one. If you take all money and services away, what incentive do they have to provide you with a good service? The analogy shouldn’t be about not paying your insurance premium; it should be about having to return to work with the person you had a regretful fling with at the office Christmas party…

So what can you do to improve your CMS support?

1. Educate yourself: have procedures to handle common issues (restarting the servers, clearing the cache, etc.). Train internal staff to deal with these and provide procedures to out-of-hours support teams, be they internal or at your hosting company. This will cater for the vast majority of issues that don’t need any further investigation.
2. Get to the root of the problem. Are you unhappy with your software (or implementation), or simply with your supplier’s responsiveness. If there’s something fundamentally wrong with the product, you should be selecting a new one. If the issue is service or cost then renegotiate the SLA, don’t throw it out.
3. Find someone who’ll support you better. If the software vendor cannot demonstrate their ability to meet your service level requirements, then ask them to recommend someone who will.
4. Negotiate your licences so that you get what you pay for. The help desk should be like any additional module that you’d have to purchase with the product. Why should you pay for something you don’t use?

Yes, there’s a downturn and you’re under pressure to save money. But you’re probably under more pressure to ensure that projects and services continue to be delivered. Why would you jeopardize these for the sake of a line item already in next year’s budget?

Focus on developing a good relationship with your supplier and you should find the quality of their service improves too.