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The Whys and Wherefores of Application Management Services: Reaping the Best Value from Software Solutions

By Steve_Harvey posted Aug 15, 2017 02:42 PM

  

With many technologies, keeping current and supportable is becoming more and more difficult. If your organization hasn’t or can’t move to SaaS-based solutions, it’s up to your IT team to ensure that your organization is getting the best value from your software—and that the cost of supporting out-of-date software doesn’t impact your budget negatively.

Whilst you are focusing on your core business and rightly directing resources to projects at the forefront of your IT strategy, niche areas like enterprise management are often left to wither. Ultimately, they become a ball and chain as backlogs increase and technical debt mounts.

Compounding the problem is the fact that internal resources lose skill sets and the knowledge required to maintain and grow certain software solutions. This often results in capital projects in which a new vendor’s solutions are deployed to fix ailing environments. This creates a sine wave of value as you cycle from vendor to vendor—when what you really want is to steadily climb the maturity/value ladder.

That’s were CA’s Application Management Services’ (AMS) TechOps and Adoption Services come in. AMS helps organizations avoid this unfortunate situation and guides them with the experience, resources and best practices that allow you to ride the value curve, gain many benefits of a SaaS solution, and stay at the top.

From its inception, AMS was, for want of a better phrase, a ‘lights-on service’ for your environment; we call it TechOps. Near-shore teams take the day-to-day tasks away from your own over-committed resources; they maintain and monitor your system to ensure optimum performance and reduce risk. But AMS is much more than that. I’ve also observed an increase in cadence from customer delivery teams who, thanks to AMS, can get on with delivering services to the business, confident in the knowledge that everything they produce is well maintained, current and, above all, delivering what the business needs.

Companies like CA that offer application management services must, of course, make money, and that means that the solutions they manage must be in the best shape possible—otherwise, everyone loses. By virtue of effective management, your organization’s spot on the maturity curve is secure and stable—but this is only half the story. Without Adoption Services to supplement TechOps, your organization would stagnate at a point of stall; this is where the Adoption Services component of AMS kicks in.

The use of Adoption Services signals an organization’s intent to climb the maturity curve. CA collaborates with your team to map your strategy to a book of work with fixed outcomes that will deliver the business value you need from your software. This outcome-driven approach is adaptable to change, but the CA Services team focuses on achieving your goals by translating business requirements into operational and technical output. This process enables you to clear backlogs, clear up technical debt and move forward with new challenges. Many AMS customers have seen this approach, which meshes well with agile delivery, increase the tempo of project delivery.

I recently worked with several customers who reaped the benefit of AMS’ TechOps and Adoption Services. Having spent many years delivering software projects that never seem to move beyond phase one of maturity, I’m happy to say that working with customers who embrace the AMS philosophy has allowed me to use my knowledge and experience to deliver excellent value from their investment in CA software. In my book, AMS is a winner!

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