The volume of applications that enterprises rely upon has expanded. The near universal drive for digital transformation has meant that businesses everywhere are infusing digital capabilities into the core of their business operations, which requires them to manage a wider set of applications. But there is a problem. Enterprises are finding that traditional application lifecycle management methodologies are not good enough.
Recent research from IDC shows that more than 20 percent of organizations now have more than 250 applications in their portfolios. Moreover, a third of organizations say they’ll have more than 250 applications in their portfolios in five years. As such, it’s vital that organizations reexamine their approach to lifecycle management with an eye toward modernizing delivery to enhance application deployment and quality. And alongside that, incorporate intelligence and analytics at every stage to create business value from application development and management activities.
The research shows that all organizations are now using DevOps and Agile methodologies to build and deploy applications, driving the need for holistic delivery to ensure proper test coverage and streamlined coordination across the application lifecycle. Application lifecycle management is also being impacted by shortened delivery cycles, increased testing volume and the lack of real-time data and holistic intelligence needed to create optimized deployment strategies.
Benefits of modernized application delivery
The organizations that evolve their application delivery and application lifecycle management methodologies are gaining a number of benefits from doing so, including:
- Operational agility driven by real-time data: Enables organizations to course-correct ailing application delivery tasks based on data-driven insights. Such adjustments can help organizations better adapt to external and internal changes.
- Increased capacity, velocity and quality: By leveraging insights and reusing digital assets and libraries, application delivery teams can create capacity for development backlogs, while also identifying and remediating performance issues.
- Improved ROI: Application delivery teams can reduce costs, speed deployment cycle times and improve application delivery efficiency by using modern application delivery insights, tools and processes.
- Identify new business capabilities: Real-time data drives new insights for expanding and unlocking new business opportunities.
- Reduce application business risks and errors: Adding insight and flexibility throughout the application delivery process enables teams to reduce errors, while giving business users value-added functionality more quickly.
To reap the benefits of modern application delivery as part of application lifecycle management enables organizations to gain competitive advantage. To do so, organizations need to focus on getting buy-in from management and consistently illustrating how the changes they’re proposing will impact and improve business outcomes throughout the organization. Taking this step ensures that executive teams can effect the cultural and management evolutions required.
Likewise, application teams should focus on quality at the core with metrics and insights that guide transformation. Organizations should focus first on application quality metrics – things like defect management, user satisfaction and activity traceability – to begin their transformational journey. Such metrics help organizations set goals for change. They’re then able to focus on software delivery, cost management, scalability and speed metrics before maturing to metrics that center on direct linkages of application delivery to line-of-business impact.
Finally, teams will benefit from positioning data and automation, in contrast with traditional application delivery methodologies that rely upon talent and management to drive delivery performance. It’s vital for organizations to embrace automation and augment it with insights and talent to evolve their application delivery competencies. Utilizing automation throughout all facets of application delivery drives increased levels of delivery standardization and higher levels of quality consistency. Additionally, organizations can apply data intelligence on top of existing automation via artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to elevate automation capabilities more deeply within and across application delivery phases.
To learn more about IDC’s findings, read The IDC Market Spotlight, sponsored by Apexon, The Digital Age Sparks a New Era for Modern Application Delivery. Contact Apexon below to learn how we can help you modernize your application delivery and application lifecycle management systems.
