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Lifecycle Management FAQ
Here are some of the most common questions on application lifecycle management, as provided by our authors for this special report.
Posted October 15, 2003
Q. What are some of the advantages of introducing application lifecycle management practices within an organization?
A. One of the immediate advantages is mastery of the software and the applications in the network, better inventories, better knowledge of your target users, and better understanding of what types of products are within your network. One of the main reasons for this is that when organizations start managing the complete application lifecycle, one of the first things they need to do is understand all the products they use in the network. This is often a perfect opportunity to perform a software rationalization review. This allows you to identify duplicate software in the network and reduce the overall application management workload. It's always better to know what you've got out there.
Q. Some people have recommended that we use conflict management within our application lifecycle. If we decide to do so, how can we reduce our conflict management efforts?
A. Conflict management—the review of every component in either applications or software and its validation against all the other components in the network—can make life a lot easier because it guarantees system stability. But generic conflict management can take a lot of time because you have to match each product against all the other products in the network. We reduce conflict management efforts by using role-based system configurations. By designing a role-based configuration, you reduce the number of software products that can coexist on a given system. This means you don't have to manage conflicts between all the products in your network, but rather, only those that will live together on any given system.
Q. What are the factors that would make someone decide to implement application lifecycle management?
A. Several factors can lead to this decision: The most common is a high level of support calls related to the proper operation of software and applications in your network as well as their installations. Another common factor is deployment projects. It is statistically proven that when you structure software products before deploying a new network, you can obtain significant gains in reliability and stability; therefore, many organizations choose to implement application lifecycle management at the early stages of a deployment project. It helps them master the commercial software in their network as well as redesign and redevelop their internal applications to make sure they operate properly on the new operating system. Whatever your reason, you will note the positive benefits of complete application lifecycle management once it is in place.
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