Note

Applications pass through four lifecycle stages: Birth, Growth, Maturity, and Death. To effectively manage each application, the IT leader and Applications Manager (AM) must know to which state it belongs.

Use these notes to apply cost-savings across your department. Discover cost savings in every aspect of your cost-to-serve expenses, and use the guidance and tools below to start reducing costs today.

Do you need to make a difference this week? This month? Take a look at these tactics and tools to build your guerilla plan.

Template/Policy

Over the course of an application's lifecycle, maintenance costs will comprise the majority of total cost of ownership. An Application Maintenance Policy should be in place for all COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) applications to maximize...

Cutting back on service levels, negotiating with vendors, and implementing good application maintenance processes can yield short and long-term cost reduction results with minimal consequences on day-to-day business activities. Assess the area...

Managing multiple enterprise data sources is painful, especially when they contain conflicting or incomplete information. Steps must be taken to reconcile the data sources and establish a master data set for reporting and analytics. To gain...

Enterprises typically spend more than half of application budgets on maintenance and enhancement. Managing the application portfolio can give organizations insight into which applications are providing value, and which are money pits. Understand...

With good planning, the benefits of systems management software can be substantial. Investigate how automation can save on manual system management efforts.

A dilemma facing companies today is whether or not to upgrade their Microsoft operating systems from Windows XP to Windows Vista. While there are many improvements in Vista, Info-Tech finds that companies should not base the decision to upgrade...

Questioning the value of existing software maintenance and support agreements and not getting a good answer? Consider ditching this 15-25% annual expense and save money.

Application Portfolio Management (APM) has the potential to make a big dent in application maintenance and support costs, but in a tough economy getting funding will be a challenge. Rather than implementing expensive APM software, start with...

Note

Application maintenance consumes an enormous portion of enterprise IT budgets and resources. There is often little consideration given to which applications provide real business value and warrant resources and which provide little or no value....

Note

Failure to properly maintain software assets wastes money and can put the enterprise's reputation at risk if downtime is the result. Implement an application maintenance policy to control and raise the profile of this important, yet often...

Tool

Most organizations (and application maintenance departments for that matter) do not record and/or monitor key application maintenance metrics. There is almost always maintenance going on within an organization; nonetheless, it's important to...

Software is the backbone of the modern business world. While conception, design, and implementation phases are all key aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle, maintenance, which occurs over the actual life of the software, is arguably the...

Tool

Many enterprises find themselves having to streamline a very large IT applications portfolio because of application redundancy, application aging, and unnecessary complexity. Use a three-phase approach to application retirement to put the right...