Application Management (AM) is the lifecycle process for software applications, covering how an application operates, its maintenance, version control, and upgrades from cradle to grave. Application management services are an enterprise-wide endeavor providing governance designed to ensure applications run at peak performance and as efficiently as possible, from the end-user experience to integration with enterprise back office functions such as database, ERP, and SaaS cloud functions such as CRM.

In this manner, AM acts as a service operation function that manages and supports applications and key stakeholders who provide operational proficiency or technical expertise through the lifecycle.

Some AM processes include Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Application Performance Management (APM).

There are several stakeholder groups in AM, who should work as a team to reach critical decisions such as build or buy, whether an application should be modernized or replaced, or where the application should be hosted.

Some key stakeholders in AM are:

• Application Manager/Application Analyst: Owns the AM process and thus manages the overall application lifecycle. Typically, there would be one Application Analyst or a team of Application Analysts for each major application. Also responsible for performing skills gap analysis and acquiring needed skills or staff.
• Business Unit Owners: Business-level staff members who view applications and AM in terms of bottom-line benefits, increased productivity, impact on revenue, and improved competitive stance.
• Developers/DevOps/DevSecOps: This group of IT professionals are charged with the design, development, deployment, integration, security, and maintenance of applications.
• Application users: Users provide feedback on productivity and performance, and key concerns for users include privacy, and security of the applications.

The ultimate goal of AM is to implement efficient, reliable, and cost-effective code that enables an enterprise to meet its business objectives by ensuring that the required capabilities – both management and technical – are in place, and to further ensure that any technical issues are rapidly diagnosed and resolved.

Application management is a key factor in a business’ ability to innovate. By ensuring that business functions are being properly addressed with modern applications, business process solutions can be brought to market more efficiently, quickly, and at a lower total cost. When applications are efficiently managed, more IT resources are available to focus on new business challenges and competitive issues.

Additionally, effectively managed applications are more reliable and less prone to failure that could lead to loss of functionality. Thus, application management can reduce the risk of downtime and improve overall business continuity.

By incorporating new capabilities and monitoring user issues, application management can provide an enhanced end-user experience, which not only increases productivity but also helps accelerate the adoption of new applications or features.

The importance of application management to the bottom line is manifold. Efficient management strategies reduce person-hours spent in meetings, yielding higher productivity. Solid application management practices can reduce the need to retain expensive outside consultants, and lower overall operating costs as the number and frequency of application problems decrease.

Traditionally, AM was part of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes, specifically as part of the ITIL Process Map as outlined in the process overview of ITIL Application Management.

Once the build-vs-buy decision for a given application is made, AM stakeholders collaborate with technical teams including DevSecOps to ensure the requisite skills to design, test, manage, and improve the application’s services are on hand or acquired and constantly refined to meet changing environment and needs. Note that the exact functions of an application management system are constantly evolving, just as application development methodologies have evolved from waterfall to agile to cloud-native.

Since not every organization has the capability of staffing full time AM positions, or is already dealing with IT backlog, many organizations rely on application management services (AMS) to augment their AM capabilities. AMS organizations enable the outsourcing of application maintenance and monitoring, and AMS firms then shoulder the responsibility of patch management, bug fixes, and enhancements, freeing up valuable IT, line of business (LOB), and DevSecOps resources. Even large enterprises utilize AMS services to help reduce backlogs, as evidenced by a Gartner report showing that IT backlogs were hindering application adoption.

Enterprises can prevent these backlogs – and the user-dissatisfaction, interruptions and other inefficiencies those backlogs cause – by outsourcing the monitoring, management, bug-fixing and optimization tasks for those apps to an AMS provider.

AMS organizations help mitigate continuity risks that occur when key personnel leave, reduce the time required to backfill necessary AM skills, and can contribute to every application from web application to database to custom in-house business code developed on legacy platforms.

For many small/medium businesses (SMBs), AMS providers may be the only reasonable way to achieve a robust application lifecycle management process, given the typically limited IT resources present. The AMS market is rapidly growing, with estimates from Grand View Research indicating that the global AMS market would exceed USD $87B by 2025.