My previous three posts about the Application Services Library (ASL) covered Applications Cycle Management, Organization Cycle Management, and Application Maintenance Management. The Application Services Library (ASL) is currently on version 2.0.
ASL 2.0 is usable for all application management organizations, i.e., application management organizations that deliver application services (management and maintenance) and application management organizations that realize the integration of underlying services. Application management comprises managing, maintaining, and renewing applications, drawing up policies for the application management organization and the application portfolio under management and directing the activities required.
To refresh your memory, I’ll show you below figure again, the Application Services Library (ASL2.0) Framework with the following pillars:
- Organization Cycle Management
- Applications Cycle Management
- Maintenance
- Enhancement & Renovation
This post will be my last post about the Application Services Library and will cover the enhancement & renovation of applications: the last building block of ASL 2.0.
Application Enhancement & Renovation
Enhancement of an application is the result of a request for change in functional or non-functional requirements that you didn’t specify during the initial creation of the existing application system.
Renovation of an application occurs when you make considerable changes to an existing application to extend its life cycle.
Enhancing or renovating an application is critical, such as fixing bugs. You need to update applications over time to correct any errors or bugs in the previous version. These bugs could cause functionality, security, or stability issues, and enhancing the application can help resolve these problems.
Additionally, you want to improve the performance of your applications over time to create more efficiency and ease of use by your users. You can integrate enhancements to optimize the performance of an application for this, involving improving the speed at which the application runs, reducing the amount of memory it uses, or making it more efficient in some other way.
Over time, you can add new features or capabilities to improve performance by adding new tools or functions, improving the user interface, or integrating with other software or systems.
You also have to keep a constant eye on security. Applications are often enhanced to improve their security. Improving the security of applications could involve adding new security features, improving authentication mechanisms, or making other changes to ensure that user data is protected and conform to the latest best practices in cyber defense.
Finally, it would help if you kept applications up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends. Keeping your applications up-to-date can help to ensure that the application remains relevant and useful to users.
Enhancement and renovation at an operational level
The enhancement and/or renovation of ICT objects (software, documentation, and design) have a project-based approach within the framework of a renewal scenario. Remember that you must pay attention to the definition and initiation of a project before you start with the actual realization, meaning that you set down the project, project process, and product requirements, planning, and budget, and have a project organization available.
Generally, you carry out the following activities:
Impact and analysis
Impact analysis is the process of evaluating the potential effects of a proposed change to an existing application. This analysis involves identifying all components and processes within an application that could be affected by the change and any downstream effects that could impact other applications, systems, or processes.
An impact analysis aims to assess the risks and benefits associated with a proposed change and determine whether the change is worth implementing. By analyzing the impact of a proposed change, you can identify potential issues and take steps to mitigate them, reducing the risk of unexpected consequences or unintended side effects.
Design
Design is critical to enhancing and renovating your applications because it helps you create a clear plan for the changes to the applications you intend to make. The plan you create involves identifying the goals and objectives of the enhancements and any constraints or limitations that may impact the design process. To execute this design phase appropriately, you must follow some critical steps.
First, you need to gather and analyze the requirements for the enhancements. The gathering and analyzing stage involves working closely with your stakeholders to identify the needs of the application, the users, and any functional or technical requirements.
Once you have gathered the requirements, the next step is to create a conceptual design for the enhancements, involving the definition of the high-level structure of the system, including its components, interfaces, and behavior.
When you have the conceptual design in place, the next step is to create a detailed design that specifies the implementation details of the enhancements, including the design of the algorithms, the data structures, and the user interfaces you use to enhance your application.
Rationalization
Rationalization refers to the process of streamlining and optimizing an existing software system. Your goal of rationalization is to improve an application’s efficiency, performance, and usability while reducing complexity, maintenance costs, and other inefficiencies. Rationalization can help you to identify areas of the system that could benefit from optimization or simplification, involving identifying redundant or unnecessary code, simplifying complex algorithms, or consolidating multiple components into a single, more efficient module.
Testing
Finally, you must test and validate the design to ensure it meets the intended requirements and functions. You do this by both functional testing, which verifies that the system works correctly, and non-functional testing, which tests the system’s performance, security, and usability. You can follow a fixed set of steps during a testing phase.
The first step in the testing process is to create a plan for testing the application. Creating a plan involves defining the test cases you use to evaluate the application and the criteria you use to determine whether the tests have succeeded.
Once you have created the test plan, the next step is to execute the tests. You do this by running the application under various conditions and recording the results of the tests. During the testing process, any identified defects or errors are logged and tracked to ensure that you address these defects and errors before the enhanced/renovated application is released. Once you have fixed all the defects, the next step is to perform regression testing to ensure that the changes made to the application have not introduced any new defects or errors.
Finally, the application is tested and accepted by the (key) users to ensure that it meets their needs and functions as intended.
Implementation
In the implementation phase, you put the changes or improvements made to an application during its enhancement or renovation into effect after it is thoroughly tested and accepted by the (key) users. During the implementation phase, the changes made during the design, development, and testing phases are integrated into your production environment, replacing the old application.
Connection process between “maintenance” and “enhancement & renovation”
You can distinguish two processes at an operational level as the connections between your maintenance cycle on the one hand and the enhancement/renovation cycle on the other hand.
Change management
The change management process determines which change requests you introduce in a “release.” With your (key) users and business process owners, you validate this by an impact analysis, resulting in an agreement on the alterations you will make, the scheduling, the costs, and the completion dates. Change management forms the incoming channel for enhancing and renovating your applications.
Software control and distribution
The software control and distribution process covers controlling and distributing software objects and additional objects (i.e., documentation and design) during the development, testing, and transfer phases. Control means a safe working method that must limit unauthorized use, change, or deletion risks. You can describe this process as the outgoing channel: adapted ICT components are transferred to production and utilized by the users.
Wrapping up the ASL Framework
Application management is the contracted responsibility for the management and execution of all activities that relate to the maintenance and evolution of your existing applications. When you manage and execute all these activities, you do this within well-defined service levels (SLAs). Maintenance, enhancement, and renovation of applications must be managed in a business-economically sound manner. Always ask yourself, “is this adding value to my organization and my colleagues using the application.” The fundamental principle is to support your business processing using information systems for the business processes’ life cycle. You need to take two critical viewpoints into account for this:
The perspective of supporting the business processes using information systems
You have to keep your application up and running. You also have to ensure that your applications support the organization’s day-to-day activities, involving the provision of continuous service by making a firm agreement about the service level and restoring the agreed service level as soon as possible in case of deviations. Ensure you create a high level of accessibility for questions and remarks of your users about the service, preventing disruptions and facilitating new services by responding as an ICT service-first provider. The focus must be on service, the service that you provide, and that facilitates the use of applications. From a costing perspective, you need at least 10-20% of the overall application management costs for internal services.
Take in mind that there is service and SERVICE. Service is not simply ticking off an incident from a customer. Service means understanding what the customer needs and, in the best case scenario, offering a customer something they didn’t know they needed. When that happens, you turn service into hospitality, which should be any service department’s goal.
The perspective of the life cycle of business processes
Organizations evolve, environments change, and markets change as well. When you want your applications to continue functioning optimally, the supporting information systems must also grow within an organization. Your information systems can only increase by enhancing the applications to the current and future technical and functional requirements.
The application management framework highlights several requirements to provide a professional application service within your organization. The framework also offers three perspectives broadly aimed at strategic, tactical, and technical management. If you want to provide a high-quality professional applications service, you need to:
- Manage applications in portfolio terms: i.e., recognize that applications are a business asset that must justify financial support to sustain their value. Your applications always need to add value to the business and its processes.
- Identify and assess the risks of maintenance, and ensure that you realize your users’ benefits
- Have a robust maintenance strategy for the maintenance and renewal of legacy applications and systems to extend the useful life of existing applications cost-effectively and timely.
Ensure that you incorporate your ICT infrastructure management requirements during the design and development stages of applications and consider the maintainability and other quality attributes throughout the life of an application.
Final Thoughts
The ASL framework offers excellent support in implementing an application management organization. You can use this framework very well in connection with models for technical management (ITIL4) and functional management (BISL). The framework overcomes some limitations of other frameworks (like R2C), like scalability, lack of strategic direction, visibility of business plans, and benefits realization.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions or in case you have any additional advice/tips about this subject. If you want to keep me in the loop if I upload a new post, subscribe so you receive a notification by e-mail.
