Applications are at the heart of digital transformation. The growth of cloud computing and the rapid adoption of as-a-service solutions are changing the way companies offer products and services to their customers. Due to the greater attractiveness of SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings, especially for the provision of core business applications, spending on shadow IT is increasing by more than 60 percent annually in all industries. Now, IT spending on applications is increasing by 6 to 8 percent annually.
At the same time, Agile and DevOps methodologies are reinventing the way development and operations teams design and deploy these applications. And new practices like Design Thinking and Kanban clash exactly with the way companies have traditionally kept their old application portfolios - workloads that are still firmly anchored in process descriptions and SLAs. Fixed price contracts.
These multiple levels of simultaneous change are causing business application management services managers to redefine their budgets and make procurement decisions. Essentially, they need to expand their goals from local optimization to lifecycle management and prepare their team to take a business idea from inception to product recall.
This means that internal IT has to forego software development and module tests and take on the role of technology and service broker. It also means that the future of application management must include these 5 main rules for engagement:
1. Turn business needs into business opportunities. This requires IT to move from a narrow understanding of technology to a narrow understanding of business so that it knows how to develop solutions with the right technology and the right partnerships. Application administrators need to be proactive. You and your team need to look for new technologies and trends and define the specific business opportunities that they will enable for your company.
2. Design solutions with partners. The times of buying and building decisions are over. Nowadays the decision is more complex: buy versus create versus reuse versus subscribe versus partner. If IT is doing the right thing for a company, it should now play the role of a tech-savvy architect for business solutions. If both buyers and sellers of IT services see this core competency shift as an opportunity, the end result is likely to be more beneficial for all parties involved. Taking into account whether the working solution is in proof of concept mode or in scaling mode will determine how it will be mapped.
3. Select and negotiate components. It is true that the SaaS solutions on the market may not fully cover all of your needs. However, this does not mean that you have to build the solution from scratch. We have graduated from having to use System Integrator (IS) providers for large IS projects. The lines between "service" and "product" are blurring, and this brings several IT vendors into play: those who provide components as services, and those who add knowledge and expertise to their services to turn them into products. Organizations must carefully consider how they can leverage the different types of IT providers and solutions out there to build and modernize their application landscape.
4. Create a starter solution. Don't guess what the market needs, try it out. With DevOps and Continuous Delivery, you can now create quick solutions and test them with real people. Instead of just testing that the software works, test that it meets the needs of the market. Deployment speed allows you to test two variations of the same feature in the market and keep the one that works best. Focus on creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the version of the product that allows you to capture the maximum amount of customer learning with the least amount of effort.
5. Release a solution iteratively and review, refine, and improve it. Once you have the MVP, focus on the speed of adoption before moving towards complete stability. An application's success rate depends on how quickly it can integrate features that the user community values and needs, whether internal or external. Iterative versions of the solution ensure a continuous connection with the user community and increase their acceptance.
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