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Throwing Apps "Over the Wall"
META Group's Thomas Murphy answers six questions about application deployment.
Posted October 15, 2003
FTPOnline interviewed Thomas Murphy, senior program director at META Group, Inc., an IT research and advisory service. See what he has to say about zero administration, "throwing applications over the wall" to IT, and more.
FTPOnline: What are the biggest issues facing IT in terms of deploying and maintaining applications?
Thomas Murphy: As we move toward an era of Web services and grid-based computing, there is a tremendous demand on developers to radically improve the quality and documentation of their software and also to understand the operational demands of the code they create. This drives a need for much better coordination between development and operations staff members.
FTPOnline: There's a perception that in-the-trenches developers don't think about deployment. Has this changed? How has that affected IT?
Thomas Murphy: I believe this perception still holds. Developers build systems and toss them over the wall to operations, not warning them ahead of time about requirements or understanding how they can better instrument code to improve application manageability. This causes huge cost issues where applications are deployed to dedicated servers and inhibits server consolidation.
Operations also gets broadsided a lot, having to scramble at the last minute to put systems into production. Some organizations are doing a better job, but we believe that operations staff should be involved during the requirements-gathering phase and on through the analysis, design, and development of software solutions.
FTPOnline: It's been said that most IT groups see 60 to 80 percent of their budget soaked up by maintenance of existing applications. What can be done to reduce maintenance time and cost?
Thomas Murphy: This is tough for a few reasons. First, companies often do a poor job of defining what constitutes maintenance. When a bug fix is required, everyone engages in a little "can you do this for me while you're at it?" So first you have to define software maintenance as Fix on Fail; everything else is enhancement work.
Second, organizations should practice portfolio management to understand the value of software assets and the costs associated with running them. This will enable a reasoned approach to when should systems be rewritten or retired. Going forward, the creation of an Enterprise Architecture that defines overall policies, patterns, and practices is fundamental because costs often run out of control due to the inconsistent nature of what we produce.
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