Business Connexion Offering Applications Management Services
The core of the Application Outsourcing Services is the Application Management component. Business Connexion utilises an Application Management framework based on ITIL3 to support and manage high quality systems. This document describes in detail how the process works from the support of the system, to definition and implementation of small enhancements. This approach followed by Business Connexion has resulted in consistent successes, year-on-year in the applications it manages for its high valued clients.

Overall, the objectives of Application Management are to:

• provide comprehensive, defined practices for business focused Applications Management;
• ensure an integrated and centralised approach to Application Management, thereby ensuring consistency of service and information provided;
• establish a well documented and proven Application Management process, supported by industry best practices as identified through market research and business needs;
• enhance a long-term strategic relationship with application vendors to continuously improve value and deliver customer delight, and
• move processes from Initial to Repeatable to Managed/Aligned and then Optimised (Strategic view of applications in Application Portfolio Management).

The benefits that can be gained from Application Management are to:

• reduce the amount of management time currently spent on maintaining this activity;
• allow management to focus on activities of strategic importance and high priority;
• reduce reliance on key skills and management thereof;
• ensure that the workforce understands the roles and responsibilities leading to increased productivity.
• reduce the cost associated with the applications support environment;
• improve delivery of service, reduce delivery risk for projects and increase access to capacity, and
• focus on continuous improvement initiatives to help increase business competitiveness;
• other benefits that may be gained include saving on licensing (when consolidating business systems), saving on support costs (by ensuring common development platforms and architectures), saving on duplication of functions (similar functions are consolidated), and improving service levels with the end users.

 Application management incorporates the management of a portfolio of applications through the following functional areas:

• Application Development Management (Maintenance), which includes the core processes of:
• Requirements
• Design
• Build
• Application Service Management (Support), which includes the core processes of:
• Deploy
• Operate
• Optimise

This is represented diagrammatically in the figure below.

Figure 1 – Application Management Functional Areas and Core Processes

The aim is always preventative maintenance and the avoidance of costly downtime. This is highly dependent on the agreement defined in the SLA. This is usually facilitated by performing day-to-day operational tasks and pro-actively monitoring of events. Each application has a number of tasks performed on it to ensure that it remains healthy. These tasks can be broken down into daily, weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc tasks. The operational team develops a profile of the application listing the tasks that need to be performed, who is responsible for performing them, and when they need to complete them. Tasks are also evaluated to determine which of these can be done via an event management system.

Should a change be needed to the application to resolve a problem, the deployment of the fix to the application would adhere to release and change management as described in the deployment section of this document.

Figure 2 – Application Management Context

The figure below applies the ITIL3 framework for Service Management to Application Management and indicates the inter-relationship between the ITIL Service Management and Application Management processes.

Figure 3 – ITIL3 Mapping to Application Management