Application Management principles

6.5.3.1 Build or buy?

One of the key decisions in Application Management is whether to buy an application that supports the required functionality, or whether to build the application specifically for the organization’s requirements. These decisions are often made by a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) or Steering Committee, but they are dependent on information from a number of sources. These are discussed in detail in Service Design, but are summarized here from an Application Management function perspective.

Application Management will assist in this decision during Service Design as follows:

• Application sizing and workload forecasts (see section 4.6.4)
• Specification of manageability requirements
• Identification of ongoing operational costs
• Data access requirements for reporting or integration into other applications
• Investigating to what extent the required functionality can be met by existing tools – and how much customization will be required to achieve this
• Estimating the cost of customization
• Identifying what skills will be required to support the solution (e.g. if an application is purchased, will it require a new set of employees, or can existing employees be trained to support it?)
• Administration requirements
• Security requirements.

If the decision is to build the application, a further decision needs to be made on whether the development will be outsourced or built using employees. This is detailed in the Service Strategy and Service Design publications, but there are some important considerations affecting Service Operation, for example:

• How will manageability requirements be specified and agreed (e.g. designing application and transaction monitoring)? These are sometimes forgotten when the operational teams or departments are not represented in the project
• What are the Acceptance Criteria for operational performance; how and where will the solution be tested and who will perform the tests?
• Who will own and manage the Definitive Library for that application?
• Who will design and maintain the operational management and administration scripts for these applications?
• Who is responsible for environment set-up and owning and maintaining the different infrastructure components?
• How will the solution be instrumented so that it is capable of generating the required events?

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1003