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Application Management

Application management provides a wide variety of application services, processes and methodologies for maintaining, enhancing and managing custom applications, packaged software applications or network-delivered applications.

Application Management (AM) is the lifecycle process for software applications, covering how an application operates, its maintenance, version control, and upgrades from cradle to grave. Application management services are an enterprise-wide endeavor providing governance designed to ensure applications run at peak performance and as efficiently as possible, from the end-user experience to integration with enterprise back office functions such as database, ERP, and SaaS cloud functions such as CRM.

Intro​

Today, it is almost impossible for businesses to run a business without using any application according to their business needs. That's why companies are starting to use more apps every day. In this increasing application stack, companies have difficulty in managing their business processes. Application Portfolio Management is a set of business processes that facilitate the management of applications within the company.

Application Management Software (aka. Application Portfolio Management Software) is designed to monitor and manage all applications within the organization. It covers the practices, techniques, and procedures necessary for the optimal operation, performance, and efficiency of any application throughout the enterprise and back-end IT infrastructure.

What is Application Management?​

Application Management is the lifecycle process for software applications that covers how applications work from inception to disposal, maintenance, version control and upgrades. The purpose of Application Management is from end-user experience to integration with corporate back-office functions such as database and ERP and to ensure that it works in the most efficient way.

Application Management is used to reach critical decisions such as whether to modernize any application, replace it, or where the application should be hosted. They have stakeholders who make these critical decisions and maintain operational practices or offer technical expertise. Key stakeholders in Application Management; application manager, department owners, developers and application users.

It operates as a service operations function that supports and allows to manage applications and key stakeholders that provide operational competence or technical expertise through the Application Management lifecycle.

It operates as a service operations function that supports and allows to manage applications and key stakeholders that provide operational competence or technical expertise through the Application Management lifecycle.

Why should Businesses use Application Management Software?​

Using Application Management allows to increase current efficiency, increase user satisfaction, and free IT Teams to focus on progress rather than constantly reverting to existing or outgoing technology.

Why should Big-Size Businesses use Application Management Software?​

As the number of applications used in businesses and the complexity of each application expands, it becomes harder for existing IT teams to manage lists. As lists get harder to manage, IT teams worry about how support will reduce their budget and how much backlogs will increase. This causes enterprise application adoption to slow down.

Organizations help prevent these backlogs and user dissatisfaction, outages, and other inefficiencies caused by these backlogs by outsourcing the monitoring, management, error correction, and optimization tasks for these applications from an Application Management software provider.

Application Management software providers allow organizations to function as intended through applications while freeing internal teams to focus on other projects.

Why should Small and Mid-Size Businesses use Application Management Software?​

A major constraint for small and medium businesses is also the lack of resources, which translates into very limited internal IT resources. However, it is necessary to apply it as a tool to balance the lack of human resources and physical infrastructure, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises.

It is critical that applications work as expected and not cause business interruption or loss of customers. Relying on an Application Management software provider protects applications and relieves IT team support in small and midsize businesses.

Finding the right database and application management skills for a single person to manage applications in small and midsize businesses can be difficult. With Application Management software, individuals with database expertise can be employed to manage applications with different application packages.

It doesn't matter whether you are a small or large business to use application management software. No matter what type of business, using Application Management software has many benefits for any business.

What are the Benefits of Using Application Management Software (AMS)?​

Application Management is an important factor for organizations to innovate. It can bring business process solutions to market more efficiently, quickly and with a lower total cost. However, effectively managed applications are more reliable and less error-prone, which can lead to loss of functionality. Application Management provides many benefits for organizations.

Since not every organization has the capability of staffing full time AM positions, or is already dealing with IT backlog, many organizations rely on application management services (AMS) to augment their AM capabilities. AMS organizations enable the outsourcing of application maintenance and monitoring, and AMS firms then shoulder the responsibility of patch management, bug fixes, and enhancements, freeing up valuable IT, line of business (LOB), and DevSecOps resources. Even large enterprises utilize AMS services to help reduce backlogs, as evidenced by a Gartner report showing that IT backlogs were hindering application adoption.

Supports innovation​

Application Management software helps to best manage applications within the organization. In this way, application development teams can spend more time creating and developing new innovations. This situation causes employees and related teams to make important business decisions about IT investments, IT budgets, etc.

Barriers between teams are broken down as Application Management software encourages new collaborative ideas and seamless information flow. It strengthens internal communication.

Increases performance and efficiency​

Application Management software improves the availability and performance of critical applications, increasing business performance and revenue streams. In addition, it helps to get maximum results from investments made in skills, processes and technologies with Application Management software.

Provides platform stability​

Application Management software accelerates development through simplified integration and interconnected systems. It fixes recurring problems and helps prevent unnecessary upgrades. This causes the application development team to fully concentrate on development.

Improves the end-user experience​

Higher-quality apps provide a better user experience. However, it also increases productive business interaction between internal and external users. Thus, quality increases and stakeholders' needs and expectations are met.

Saves time and cost​

With the help of Application Management software, it allows stakeholders to synchronize their design, development and testing efforts, reducing maintenance costs and intervals. It also greatly reduces the time spent on meetings thanks to its Application Management software.

Processes​

Some AM processes include Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Application Performance Management (APM).

Application Lifecycle Management​

Application lifecycle management (ALM) describes the ecosystem that manages an application from cradle to grave. ALM is composed of stakeholders, ALM tools, and a management process that spans each phase of an application’s existence.

As enterprises evolve from traditional waterfall to agile and DevOps to cloud-native applications, ALM tools and processes evolve in sync, so that there may be multiple ALM processes in a given organization depending on where they are in their transition from traditional to modern applications.

One goal of ALM is to combine these multiple development practices into a comprehensive management methodology that encompasses legacy, agile, and cloud-native development.

Many enterprises adopting ALM have also embraced continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) of applications with frequent releases as opposed to traditional monthly or quarterly releases that embody many changes over a period of time into a single release.

Thus, ALM encompasses the lifecycle of applications by considering the need for maintenance and updates as an ongoing process. ALM provides all stakeholders with visibility into the development process, offering a clear view of where the enterprise is in the development, integration, or maintenance of a given application.

Phases​

Governance​

Beginning with business need, application governance includes the decision-making process on why applications are needed, what problems they solve, what resources will be required to make the application a reality, and what regulatory, security, and other considerations must be taken into account, for example if data must be kept in a certain geography.

Development​

Development and DevOps teams begin the creation of the application, increasingly utilizing agile tools and methods to achieve CI/CD, whether for containerized deployments or for traditional VM workloads. The development process includes acquiring or writing code, testing the application, and facilitating its deployment once initial development is completed.

Waterfall development processes separate testing from development, with agile and DevOps teams testing is performed in conjunction with development as a single integrated process.

Maintenance​

After deployment, ALM focuses on maintenance for the remainder of the application’s useful life. Frequent releases address both bugs and feature additions, as well as integration with other new or legacy applications. Maintenance also addresses any rehosting necessary if applications are moved from on-premises to cloud and from cloud to containers.

Enterprises often rely on one or more ALM tools to facilitate the ALM process, helping to keep track of version control, collaboration, and requests for bug fixes and new features.

Popular ALM tools include Basecamp and Atlassian Jira, amongst many others.

Stakeholders​

Application Manager/Application Analyst​

Owns the AM process and thus manages the overall application lifecycle. Typically, there would be one Application Analyst or a team of Application Analysts for each major application. Also responsible for performing skills gap analysis and acquiring needed skills or staff.

Business Unit Owners​

Business-level staff members who view applications and AM in terms of bottom-line benefits, increased productivity, impact on revenue, and improved competitive stance.

Developers/DevOps/DevSecOps​

This group of IT professionals are charged with the design, development, deployment, integration, security, and maintenance of applications.

Application users​

Users provide feedback on productivity and performance, and key concerns for users include privacy, and security of the applications.

Application Manager​

Application Managers are IT professionals who own the AM process that manages the application software lifecycle within the enterprise. Typically, application managers are not developers or users, rather they are analysts who help define the need for new applications, communicate their findings to other key stakeholders, lead implementation, maintenance, and retirement of applications as part of the IT team.

Key functions of an application manager include:

  • Identifying business opportunities for new applications by analyzing workflows and determining where efficiencies can be gained
  • Determine whether new application capabilities should be purchased, subscribed to via SaaS, or developed in-house
    • If software is purchased, application manager oversees acquisition of infrastructure, installation, configuration, and application lifecycle
    • If developed in-house, application manager collaborates with development, DevSecOps, and business units to ensure application meets the defined needs and user interface requirements
  • In either case, application managers lead the roll-out to prevent any possible problems from becoming show-stoppers
  • Leads problem resolution by troubleshooting technical issues as they occur and develops a solution to solve root cause issues.
  • Determines when training is needed and oversees training for both IT and user teams
  • Ensuring application’s usefulness, or whether application should be sunsetted in favor of newer application or due to elimination of business function

Application managers are problem solvers, and as such must have solid analytical skills and the ability to develop creative solutions to problems. Since AM stakeholders exist throughout the organization, application managers by necessity have solid communication skills and leadership abilities to present and promote their suggestions and see them bear fruit.

Skills that are most often associated with application managers include:

  • Strong understanding of project management
  • System analysis including design, development, deployment, and support
  • IT troubleshooting
  • Business process automation (BPA)
  • Database management
  • Communicating technical concepts to non-IT audiences

Additionally, experience in developing training programs is a big plus, as are advanced data analytics skills such as Big Data and Machine Learning. Those interested in pursuing a career in application management should also research industry associations such as the Application Developers Alliance.