Application Management organization

Although all Application Management departments, groups or teams perform similar activities, each application or set of applications has a different set of management and operational requirement s. Examples of these differences include:

• The purpose of the application. Each application was developed to meet a specific set of objective s, usually business objective s. For effective support and improvement, the group that manages that application needs to have a comprehensive understanding of the business context and how the application is used to meet its objectives. This is often achieved by Business Analysts who are close to the business and responsible for ensuring that business requirement s are effectively translated into application specification s. Business Analysts should recognize that business requirement s must be translated into both functional and manageability specification s.
• The functionality of the application. Each application is designed to work in a different way and to perform different function s at different times.
• The platform on which the application runs. Although the platform is usually managed by a Technical Management team or department, each of them affects the way in which an application needs to be managed and operated.
• The type or brand of technology used. Even applications that have similar functionality operate differently on different databases or platforms. These differences have to be understood in order to manage the application effectively.

Even though the activities to manage these applications are generic, the specific schedule of activities and the way they are performed will be different. For this reason, Application Management teams and departments tend to be organized according to the categories of application s that they support. Typical examples of Application Management organizations include:

• Financial applications. In larger organizations where a number of different applications are used for different aspects of Financial Management, there may be several department, groups or teams managing these applications, e.g. Debtors and Creditors, Age Analysis, General Ledger, etc.
• Messaging and collaboration applications
• HR applications
• Manufacturing support applications
• Sales force automation
• Sales order processing applications
• Call centre and marketing applications
• Business-specific applications (e.g. health care, insurance, banking, etc.)
• IT applications, such as Service Desk, Enterprise System Management, etc.
• Web portals
• Online shopping.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23