Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is one of the foundational practices in Enterprise Architecture (EA) for IT governance, which enables IT to operate effectively. It encompasses the entire lifecycle of an application, from its inception to its retirement. Understanding and implementing Application Lifecycle Management provides data and insights that feed into Application Portfolio Management (APM). This contributes to ensuring applications are the right fit for the organization, optimizing productivity, and easing the management and maintenance burden for related products and services.
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What Is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?
Why is Application Lifecycle Management Important?
Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management
5 Stages of Application Lifecycle Management
Challenges of Application Lifecycle Management
Begin Your Application Lifecycle Management Journey With Ardoq
Application Lifecycle Management is the process of managing the applications an organization uses from their implementation to their eventual retirement or replacement. ALM provides a framework for setting requirements and ensuring governance before deploying software. ALM helps create a unified view of the entire application lifecycle, enabling organizations to effectively manage and control all stages of an application’s lifecycle, from choosing a system to retiring it.
But what is Application Lifecycle Management beyond a process? For organizations to plan effectively in the short and long term, they need to understand the lifecycle of their systems: when they were implemented, when they will be retired, and what will replace them. To collect this information accurately, it is important to have clear lines of responsibility between the systems and the people within the organization who are responsible for them.
While Application Portfolio Management involves managing an organization's entire collection of applications, ALM focuses on managing the entire lifecycle of individual applications. Contributing to Application Portfolio Management best practices, ALM provides data and insights that feed into APM, and APM helps organizations prioritize applications and allocate resources accordingly. Both ALM and APM are useful Enterprise Architecture tools for ensuring an organization's application portfolio delivers maximum value.
Application Rationalization, one of the various objectives of APM, identifies applications that may need to be retired or modernized. This information can then be incorporated into the Application Lifecycle Management process. ALM provides insights, such as performance metrics and maintenance costs, that are essential for effective Application Rationalization.
ALM Application Lifecycle Management is used to improve the efficiency, quality, and predictability of the software an organization may develop, implement or use. One of the core functions of ALM is to establish a clear and compelling business case for each application prior to development. This involves identifying the problem that the application will solve, quantifying the expected benefits, and assessing the potential risks and costs.
Continuous monitoring and maintenance are essential components of ALM. By tracking application performance, identifying potential issues, and implementing timely updates, organizations can proactively address risks and prevent costly downtime. This helps to protect against technology risks, such as hardware failures or software defects and ensures that applications remain secure and compliant with industry regulations.
ALM helps businesses increase the overall quality and efficiency of their IT landscape by improving these aspects:
Standardization and Consistency: ALM promotes the use of standardized processes, templates, and tools, ensuring consistency across the organization and reducing the risk of errors.
Visibility and Transparency: ALM provides real-time visibility into the status of projects, enabling stakeholders to track progress, identify potential issues, and make informed decisions.
Continuous Improvement: ALM fosters a culture of continuous improvement by providing metrics and analytics that can be used to identify areas for optimization and drive process enhancements.
Scalability: ALM solutions can be scaled to accommodate the needs of large enterprises with complex application portfolios, ensuring that the organization can effectively manage growth and change.
Application Lifecycle Management brings improved efficiency to the process of developing, implementing, and maintaining applications. It’s a collaborative process that works best when all stakeholders have visibility, and the transparency offered by Application Lifecycle Management plays a crucial role in achieving consistency.
Businesses are under constant pressure to improve performance and competitiveness by achieving greater operational efficiency, higher productivity, higher ROI, and more robust risk management. Given the central role of IT in modern business pressures, it’s imperative for IT teams to adopt tools and processes that support business performance.
ALM helps ensure software investment is aligned with business goals by clarifying the business use case and requirements of applications before their implementation. ALM also plays a vital role in mitigating challenges and enabling solutions to keep businesses competitive. By adopting ALM, businesses can improve efficiency and productivity, achieve higher ROI, and manage risk more effectively.
Thanks to its numerous benefits, Application Lifecycle Management can have a significant and positive impact on an organization’s bottom line by reducing risks and improving governance.
Good application lifecycle management ensures there is a plan for retirement so that when an application reaches its end-of-life, a successor is already in place. If this were not to happen, it could render applications that rely on the retired system unusable, impacting people and departments in the organization that depend on it.
2. Mitigate security risks
Applications are constantly evolving. If left unmaintained, organizations can quickly become vulnerable to cyber or hardware attacks as they continue operating with legacy technologies. ALM empowers key stakeholders and IT teams to forecast and avoid security threats by identifying which applications require an update or elimination, looking for a replacement, and planning the next steps for upgrade or migration.
3. Reduce costs of upgrade and migration
It is tempting to avoid upgrade or migration costs, but the true cost of legacy applications far outweighs the initial investment. Legacy applications expose organizations to data breaches that cost large amounts of money every year to fix. Moreover, they can cause reputational damage, which also translates into financial losses as the company loses business to competitors. According to the Cost of Data Breach Report 2020 by the Ponemon Institute, data breaches can cost these organizations USD 3.86 million annually on average.
Another aspect to consider is the cost of hours spent on maintenance for legacy applications. Legacy applications require more time from your IT department as they suffer a higher failure rate. Your IT personnel are then forced to focus on responding to bugs, troubleshooting, integrating changes, or tracking down rare replacement parts that may even be discontinued, instead of concentrating on projects that increase business growth and operational efficiency.
The application management lifecycle can be divided into several stages, depending on the specific methodology or framework being used. However, most ALM processes include the following key stages:
The evaluation phase marks the beginning of the ALM journey. It involves a comprehensive assessment of the business needs and the potential solutions. Key considerations during this stage include:
After evaluation, the implementation phase begins. This stage involves building and deploying the application. Key aspects to consider include:
The live phase marks the operational phase of the application, where it is used to deliver value to the business. Key management activities during this stage include:
As applications reach the end of their useful life or are replaced by newer solutions, the phasing-out phase becomes necessary. This involves a gradual transition to a new solution or discontinuation of the application. Key considerations include:
The retired phase marks the final stage of the ALM lifecycle, where the application is no longer in use, and its resources are decommissioned. Key activities include:
Ideally, when an application has reached its end-of-life and is retired, a successor should already be in place. Poor application lifecycle management can hinder this from happening and even make applications unusable. This represents a huge risk for organizations, as it can impact entire departments whose day-to-day operations are dependent upon those applications.
While Application Lifecycle Management offers numerous benefits, several challenges can stem from visibility and operability at scale. Among these challenges are the following:
Application Lifecycle Management tools collate information on people, processes, and technologies to provide a comprehensive solution for managing the entire lifecycle of an application. The choice of ALM tools will depend on the specific needs of the organization, including the size and complexity of the application landscape, the budget, and the desired level of integration with existing IT systems.
A wide range of tools is available for organizations to take advantage of. These tools can be categorized into several broad categories:
While individual tools offer specific benefits, a more comprehensive platform, such as an Enterprise Architecture platform, makes it easier to derive insights and develop clearer overviews when dealing with complex systems of dependencies, stakeholders, data sources, etc.
A modern EA platform built on a graph database is the best way to build an accurate register of applications and information about them. This makes it easier to derive insights and develop clear overviews when dealing with complex systems of dependencies, stakeholders, and data sources.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a critical first step for organizations to gain control of their application portfolio. It helps ensure applications are well-managed, deliver value, and are aligned with business priorities.
Key steps include:
Ardoq is the ideal platform upon which to create ALM processes. Extensive functionality—including data sourcing and analytics, visualizations, dashboard creation, scenario modeling and more—gives insights into the key components of the application lifecycle.
Book a demo to find out why Ardoq is the leading tool for Application Lifecycle Management.
Application Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Architecture (EA) are closely intertwined. EA provides a high-level blueprint for an organization's IT infrastructure, while ALM focuses on the development and management of individual applications. ALM plays a crucial role in realizing the goals and objectives defined by the EA.
Here's how ALM and EA interact:
ALM plays a critical role in addressing application security. By incorporating security practices throughout the application lifecycle, organizations can reduce the risk of security breaches and protect sensitive data.
Here's how ALM addresses application security:
Yes, ALM can help organizations manage their application portfolios by:
By effectively managing their application portfolios, organizations can improve their IT efficiency, reduce costs, and better support their business objectives.