Application Management role

Application Management is to applications what Technical Management is to the IT Infrastructure. Application Management plays a role in all applications, whether purchased or developed in-house. One of the key decisions that they contribute to is the decision of whether to buy an application or build it (this is discussed in detail in the Service Design publication). Once that decision is made, Application Management will play a dual role:

• It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing applications. In this role Application Management, working together with Technical Management, ensures that the knowledge required to design, test, manage and improve IT services is identified, developed and refined.
• It provides the actual resources to support the ITSM Lifecycle. In this role, Application Management ensures that resources are effectively trained and deployed to design, build, transition, operate and improve the technology required to deliver and support IT services.

By performing these two roles, Application Management is able to ensure that the organization has access to the right type and level of human resources to manage applications and thus to meet business objectives. This starts in Service Strategy and is expanded in Service Design, tested in Service Transition and refined in Continual Service Improvement (see other ITIL publications in this series).

Part of this role is to ensure a balance between the skill level and the cost of these resources.

In additional to these two high-level roles, Application Management also performs the following two specific roles:

• Providing guidance to IT Operations about how best to carry out the ongoing operational management of applications. This role is partly carried out during the Service Design process, but it is also a part of everyday communication with IT Operations Management as they seek to achieve stability and optimum performance.
• The integration of the Application Management Lifecycle into the ITSM Lifecycle. This is discussed below.

The objectives, activities and structures that enable Application Management to play these roles effectively are discussed below.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1014