IT departments are facing challenging times. Businesses are consistently questioning the cost of IT, but they also want innovative solutions that will drive business growth. It is reported that the cost of supporting and maintaining existing applications can be as high as 75% of the overall IT budget, so the challenge is to reduce that percentage so that you can invest for the future and drive business growth.
The application lifecycle
The applications your company uses follow a natural lifecycle. New applications, such as online selling or customer self-service, are introduced and as they stabilise they become key competitive differentiators. Over time, competitors offer the same services and the processes the applications support become industry best practice. If attention isn’t paid to evolving the applications, they become legacy systems and potentially hold your organisation back as opposed to helping drive it forwards.
Many companies don’t differentiate between the support requirements of their applications as they pass through the life cycle. Competitive applications, for example, require a different support model to those which drive best practices. Legacy applications require the least support and, because of their stability, are prime candidates for outsourcing.
Unless you actively manage the life cycle of your organisation’s applications, costs tend to stabilise at the highest common denominator, leading to over resourcing and over spending. In addition, if the unique support needs of each application are not carefully analysed, it can easily lead to sub-optimum service levels being driven by the lowest common denominator.
Our applications management services will help you address and overcome these issues.
