Cloudy Application Management

Adoption of Cloud Computing – in particular Software as a Service – will confront the ‘business-facing’ Application Management function with changes that add extra complexity to the execution of approximately half of the processes that Application Management entails. ‘Business-facing’ refers not to the one-to-many cloud service providers but to the department or provider that has a more intimate relationship with the end-user client. These changes reinforce previously observed trends that:

• People have to collaborate with more external parties than they used to.
• Information systems are becoming more abstract, being built from components that are no longer under the direct control of a single department.

The major recommendations are that Application Management departments should consider investing in:

• people with an external orientation and the ability to create value from existing (external) partial solutions
• people with the ability to collaborate effectively with a diversity of third parties over which they have limited formal authority
• evaluating and fine-tuning their processes.

An important assumption is that application landscapes will continue to be of a hybrid nature, encompassing various generations of technologies requiring differing technical and approaches. Depending on the capabilities of the professionals currently employed, it may be wise to invest in a new team with different ‘DNA’. Finally – because management of applications based on Cloud Computing is currently immature and therefore still difficult to formalize – it is prudent to management such systems in an ‘adhocratic’ way (multidisciplinary team with high skilled specialists, intensive communication and informal procedures). Once best practices have been created, the processes can be formalized and it can be ‘promoted’ to standard operational practice in the regular IT department.

Contents

Cloud Computing

• Software plus Data as a Service
• Your place or mine?
• Benefits
• Transition
• Legal

Application Management

• Agnostic Artists and Intelligent Integrators
• Cloud Computing Consequences
• Changes to Application Management Processes
• Genetic manipulation for Application Management
• When the clouds have blown away

Dit is een samenvatting van een eerdere publicatie van Mark Smalley op ASL BiSL Foundation

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