 greater cost component than a vendor maintenance agreement. Costs Costs for maintenance and operations become the larger share of IT spending for companies in later stages of maturity. Operations typically represent 40% to 50% of an IIC's IT budget across the board, both for young IICs and larger, more mature companies. Maintenance costs vary widely. For early stage IICs that are in the midst of their OSS deployment programs, staffing within the application development group will likely exceed other groups. For package solutions, application implementation teams vary in size from four to 15 or more people, depending on the IIC's size and complexity and the amount of conversion and business process work involved. Given that systems just being deployed account for approximately 10% of the IT budget, the maintenance function is relatively small at this time. For later stage IICs that have deployed the bulk of their The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS OSS applications, maintenance becomes a more critical issue. Maintenance often climbs to 25% to 35% of a mature IIC's IT budget. 3.5 Configuration Management Configuration management comprises three key process areas: change control, version control and release management. Change control processes are used to manage ongoing changes to the production platform. Changes are initiated through a change request process that should be developed from the start. IT and/or business users can initiate requests. An impact analysis is performed for each request to help determine the cost, time, risk and impact on current operations. Once approved, changes are either incorporated directly into the platform, after undergoing development, testing and regression testing stages, or held for inclusion in a formal release. Small and critical changes are usually incorporated immediately, while most are worked into the release schedule. Version control is used to manage the multiple versions of the same software that will likely exist, along with the associated documentati