January 2008 - Issue 5
Application Lifecycle Management

Much of the thrust of service improvements in recent years has centred on ITIL and the role of process effectiveness. This had led to a much needed focus on core disciplines such as change and incident management, with a commensurate improvement in the standards of delivery.

As in any discipline, however, there comes a point when continuing to focus on the same thing will yield diminishing returns and the core ITIL disciplines are now mature enough for to allow focus to be moved elsewhere.

ITIL v3 introduces new challenges in such areas as transition planning and designing for service, and this article discusses one aspect which exists in both v2 and v3 – that of Application Lifecycle Management.

Scope
The scope of Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM for short, is an evaluation of the applications development, delivery and maintenance processes used in an organisation from a service delivery perspective. This is done to ensure that the way such applications are delivered meets the needs of the customer as defined in any SLA’s and which will be backed up by the service teams inheriting them.

An illustration of ALM based on the ITIL, ISO and CobiT specifications

However, few companies allow their service teams effective access to the development lifecycle and yet addressing a service root cause at the business analysis stage will yield significant problem, usability and incident management benefits when the system eventually transitions to live.

A process that uses the Application Management specification of the OGC ITIL library as its base methodology and which can act as the review framework, as below, is also covered by the international security management standard ISO 17799 as well as CobiT 4.1 and so is not a geeky thing.

Best Practice doesn’t just happen
Best practice in application delivery means having clearly understood processes which ensure that:

• applications are developed against business and user needs

• mature test, user acceptance and release processes are in place

• appropriate emphasis is given to governance and security considerations

• the organisation is not financially or legally exposed by an application release

• released applications are efficiently managed by ITIL-based service management methods

• end user experience is constantly managed from on-going real time performance monitoring

• a rapid return on investment and market share is gained by efficient application
lifecycle management within the organisation

The alignment of processes between ‘silos’ in a successful organisation must allow rapid development, release and management of applications to meet organisational requirements and to provide a timely return on investment.

According to a recent survey which looked at 200 top European on line organisations, poor application response can cost in excess of £500,000 pa.

Poor response will ensure you lose customers, users and market share to your competitors, because applications that do not fulfil user requirements, especially non-functional needs that are often not well specified anyway, and take too long to deploy from initial concept to release means competitors quickly erode your market share and business.

Proposed deliverables
A review of the Application Lifecycle through the stages of development, test, release, and end-service management will allow monitoring of real external customer experience monitoring of applications. This will support the delivery of:

• A benchmark of the Application Lifecycle against industry best practice – measuring current success in delivery against external references

• A detailed analysis of the application lifecycle, identifying ‘bottlenecks’ and inhibitors to success within your organisation

• An analysis of governance or financial risks associated with the application lifecycle

• An analysis of Service Management processes associated with the development, test and deployment of applications

• An assessment on how to drive improvement in the lifecycle processes and to deliver a rapid return on investment for critical applications

• An assessment of fitness for purpose of current development and management tools

• A specification of what the underpinning OLA’s need to be to support the customer SLA’s which are either in operation or which are being planned

• A clear understanding of the end customers’ ‘user’ experience

• A report on real ‘user experience’ of web services compared to your competitors

Case Study
A major financial institution had initiated a service improvement programme which tasked its service management teams with improving delivery to ‘best practice’.

However, as well as targeting specific changes in the normal operations cycle, it also looked at ALM and found that it was only 72% complaint with ITIL standards and also returned 60% of level 4, rather than the desired 100%, against the CobiT maturity framework. This meant that further improvements in delivery standards were unlikely to be realised until the systems lifecycle was overhauled. The company brought in a new AM partner certified to CMMI level 5 (equivalent to CobiT level 5) in order to ensure alignment of development activity with service objectives.

Call to Action
Addressing ALM is a way of ensuring service management success by reducing the number of security, operability and usability issues passing through the development lifecycle unchecked. It requires a very different approach to the normal service improvement programme since the agenda crosses departmental boundaries, although the benefits are organisation-wide.

It is thought that given the emphasis given in ITILv3 to service transition, ALM is one of the key mechanisms available to deliver the next stage of quantifiable service improvements.

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