Application Lifecycle Management: a lifecycle approach

If you don’t manage your software, your system turns into a kind of millstone, hanging around your organisation’s neck. You’ll soon fall into technical debt, with an interest-on-interest-rate effect: pushing your debt repayments back and back will only cause your debt to snowball.

Dynamic data provision requires a lifecycle approach – one where your organisation continuously revisits your application landscape. Systems and solutions are never ‘complete’. What you want and need will inevitably change, so you need to make changes to your system too.

Depending on the status of your solution, one of these scenarios – all based on the Gartner TIME model – might apply to you:

• Tolerate: if no alternative is available, the solution is tolerated without major investment in the system’s functionality

• Innovate/Invest: the solution generates sufficient business value and is well maintained, with sufficient attention paid to the risks and associated costs

• Migrate: the solution delivers enough business value, but a new technology foundation is needed to make the solution agile and effective

• Eliminate: so much investment is needed that the best option is to replace the application.

Three aspects

When determining the status of a solution, we look at three aspects:

1. Business value: the extent to which the solution generates business value

2. Technical efficiency & safety: the degree to which the solution is in top condition in technical and security terms

3. Cost & risk: how well the solution operates efficiently in relation to cost and compliance.

Then looking at different perspectives, you can work out which scenario applies to you:

Application Lifecycle Management solution

To help you achieve your objectives within these scenarios, Ordina has developed the Application Lifecycle Management solution. In our experience, it isn’t enough to be driven by a solution’s technical functionality alone. Because then you end up only focusing on its design. Remember that an application only delivers value when it is actually in use. So, you need to make sure that you are being supported by short-cycle software. As the pace of innovation ramps up, this is all the more important. Otherwise, organisations get bogged down in planning, delaying your deployment of a definitive solution time after time.

Another starting point for agile working is teamwork. A team is responsible for achieving an objective and it needs to figure out how to do that. But teams could still always use some help to improve one step at a time.

That’s why Application Lifecycle Management works by homing in on specific objectives:

• Business value by using agile instruments to steer this

• High-performance software that takes care of all your application management

• Team performance by explicitly addressing the way team members work together and how the team acts within its ecosystem.