Key 2 - Product and Domain Expertise

A friend of mine caught Covid-19 last year. It was a tough period. After 3 weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, he happily overcame it. Over a year after the original infection, he still has problems, though. During that year he has been to different specialists; to a neurologist as he has concentration problems as well as ‘brain fog’ and permanent headaches; to multiple internists as he has bowel and digestion problems; to lung specialists as he is easily out of breath; and more. He has seen the hospital inside out and knows the first and last names of many of the specialists in that hospital.

You can compare our HCLSoftware Support Organization to a hospital. Though you won’t recognize our building of HCLSoftware Support as such, as we are a virtual team of specialists, HCLSoftware Support functions like a hospital. You will get to know the name of the engineer-specialist you work with. Depending on the ‘scope’ of your concern, you might get to know multiple engineers. Some, because they debug deeper, others because they know part of the relevant domain better.

Compare our Support Engineers with medical specialists. While a neurologist knows ‘everything’ about neurons, that neurologist also needs to know a lot about the body that the neuron is connected to, from the brain to the muscles it might activate or sense.

Similarly, an HCL Commerce Support Engineer knows the product, HCL Commerce, you purchased from HCL, but not only HCL Commerce. He knows how HCL Commerce is tightly coupled within the Product Stack it works with, from the Database to the Application Server, to the network it is connected to, to the way our customers design and build their on-line shops. An Appscan Engineer will know how Appscan scans the code and will also have to know (some of) the Java, C++, or other code, some of the plugins like Jenkins or Native Cloud Containers, platforms it runs on like Red Hat or Windows, authentication methods, or the security vulnerabilities it finds.

We call that Domain Expertise. Product knowledge, of course, is the core of the expertise of the Support Engineer. But how do you troubleshoot that product without knowledge of the OneDB database that might store your data? Or knowledge of the IBM WebSphere Application Server that might run it? Or Java code that flags a false positive?

To build that knowledge, we depend on teaming. Some engineers in the team might have more expertise than others around Databases or Application Servers or Networking or Performance Tuning or Java debugging, or… Those engineers will assist the Support Engineer you work with in resolving your Support Tickets.

All of this does not mean that we will resolve all your ‘stack problems’. Our core responsibility is to help you troubleshoot concerns within our product. As you will understand, we cannot be held responsible for the fix in the third-party database, your network, or your custom code. Our job will be to help find the workaround and/or build the fixes. To do that our team will have the domain expertise to identify possible product problems.

Like in a hospital, not every specialist will know everything, not even in their own specialization. To continue the metaphor: a neurologist will focus on the neurons, a heart surgeon on the heart and a nephrologist on the kidney. To do that, they will need to understand the domain, the human body, its dependencies, the interconnected organ relationships and how it functions. To build a capable hospital you need a team of specialists. Together you build that Domain Expertise.

We as an HCLSoftware Support Organization have both Product as well as Domain Expertise. Knowledge that cannot be present in every individual but that will be available in the team.

So, for us, Product and Domain expertise is all about teaming.

Welcome to HCLSoftware Support, your trusted partner in advanced analysis and resolutions.