What does Application Management for the rest of us really mean?
I started my career in IT attempting to create the necessary tools
and infrastructure to deploy large numbers of applications in a demanding and
dynamic enterprise environment. Over the past 15 years I have progressed through a journey in automating as much of
the application management process as possible. This process involved several
stages including:
- Discovery: Finding out who owns/wants/understands a particular application
- Application Packaging: getting the installation routines into standard and manageable format (e.g. MSI installer or App-V)
- QA and Testing: ensuring consistent quality and compliance to the corporate standards
- User Acceptance Testing: ensuring that users got what we they requested
- Deployment: the actual delivery of the applications to the intended platform (both server and desktop)
- Retirement: the process of removing or decommissioning applications that are no longer required
As you can imagine each of these steps requires technical skill,
expertise and time to complete. And therefore, the cost for each stage and the
aggregate of the entire process is expensive and risky. In addition, like
any non-core business process a potential distraction to the task of running a
business. So, why do organizations go through this process?
I think that there are three reasons;
- Cost
- Risk
- Increased User Expectations
Creating a process that can be optimized, automated and quality checked
will generally be cheaper in the long run if not immediately compared to an
ad-hoc informal approach when applied to large-scale systems. If you know all
of your users by name, you may not need an automated deployment tool. If you
can’t count all of your offices on both hands, you definitely do. Added to the
expected cost savings, most organizations will generally prioritize the risk of
failure over anything else. And more recently, application users and owners
expect a rapid and robust delivery process for their business critical
applications. The bar has been raised with the perceived ease of installation
and upgrades with Apple’s iPhone based applications. And, now large corporates
are now expected to support many disparate systems and timescales that would
not even be considered only a few years ago.
And, what if I am not a large corporate?
Here is where life gets’ interesting. What if I only have 200
applications instead of 10,000? Do I still need a packaging process and
deployment systems? With large-scale systems the cost saving are large and
easily quantified. With smaller systems, the benefits may not outweigh the
investment of standardized processes and automation technology.
There are definite benefits to managing your application portfolio with
tools and processes including;
- Faster deployments - if business agility is important, getting applications deployed and updated quickly may be a key business driver
- Lower support costs: sometimes difficult to measure, but standardized process and industry best practices generally lower IT supper costs
- Regulatory compliance: some industries will require high levels of processes and documentation that only automation tools can deliver
There are a host of other reasons, but most organizations benefit from
reduced overheads, better business agility and are more profitable if they
employ standardized, highly automated IT processes. If you are not doing,
chances are that your competition will and will deliver a faster, better and
cheaper product that you.
How can smaller organizations get these benefits without the associated
high costs?
A new approach is needed. Through the use of new levels of automation,
web-based self-service access and per-application pricing, organizations can
benefit from the tools and technologies previously only enjoyed by the large
corporate IT environments.
We can raise the quality bar for smaller organizations IT systems while
reducing the barriers to entry through;
- Easy to use, web-based services (minimizing infrastructure requirements and investments)
- Extensive process automation (saving time, and reducing costs)
- Low-risk Pay-as-you-go usage models
Watch this space, to find out more.
