best practices in application support

I am doing research for my boss and am at a loss as where to start. I am to do research on best practices in application support. I am completely new to this field and am looking for some guidance. ALso, I was asked to research some guidelines and examples for SLAs. Does anyone out there know where I should begin to look. I’ve been looking through white papers from Gartner but none of them deal with application support. Does app support have another name? I know this post must sound extremeley elementary to the pros, but I would appreciate any respones.