Cognizant 20-20 Insights Digital Systems & Technology Tiered Application Management: Meeting the Need for Speed and Reliability Deploying a multitiered approach to application management, guided by analysis of historic performance issues, helps companies respond to digital requirements while cutting costs. Executive Summary In the digital age, customers demand a steady stream innovative applications that drive business outcomes more of new and improved services. If one company fails to quickly than ever. The second is to deliver higher levels of provide them, they will quickly move on to a competitor. functionality, reliability, performance and throughput at Customers also demand ever-lower prices that match ever-lower cost. those provided by new digital competitors. Both of these needs can be met through a multitiered As a result, organizations must meet two seemingly approach to application management that determines contradictory needs. The first is to provide more engaging, whether to contain IT (just keep the application running), July 2019 Cognizant 20-20 Insights maintain it (minimize ongoing enhancement and approach helps organizations move from a complex, repair costs) or invest in applications based on their heterogeneous and expensive IT ecosystem to a business priority, using data that chronicles past more nimble, cost-efficient and consumer-focused application issues and the effects of technical debt — modern architecture. i.e., the cost of maintaining legacy applications. This Raising the bar, reducing complexity Given the often contradictory demands of speedy agreements (XLAs) that measure how users rank application development and great functionality the overall experience. They must leverage artificial delivered at reduced costs, CIOs are under intelligence (AI) to automatically monitor and heal unceasing pressure to beat competitors to market the application infrastructure, and to understand how with innovative products and services. These range users interact with the application to drive continual from location-based shopping to lending and improvement. banking services delivered through mobile chat. All To meet these new requirements IT leaders must: of these applications require constant improvement to their user interfaces and functionality, as well ❙ Move toward digital by modernizing core IT as data analysis about customer needs to drive systems and shifting away from development continual improvement. models based on formal methodologies such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library Such applications must meet not only service level (ITIL) and Waterfall to more agile processes such agreements (SLAs) assuring minimum levels of as Kanban and DevOps. performance and uptime, but experience level 2 / Tiered Application Management: Meeting the Need for Speed and Reliability Cognizant 20-20 Insights ❙ Enhance the customer experience through IT applications are the fulcrum in the pivot to persona-based offerings and predictive digital, driving the transformational change that capabilities that offer real-time insights into keeps businesses competitive. But as the enterprise consumer needs. grows and changes over time, the application ❙ Increase application performance and resiliency landscape becomes heterogeneous, leading to by developing more reliable, high-performing increased complexity and islands of sometimes systems. redundant applications that are inefficient to manage and difficult to adapt to new needs. ❙ Reduce costs through continuously reducing legacy debt and automating infrastructure monitoring, management and remediation. A multitiered application management strategy A digital application management strategy meets ❙ Systems of record: Applications that facilitate today’s requirements for innovation, speed, reliability smooth functioning of routine services such and efficiency by tailoring spend to the three types of as payroll processing, travel and expenses, and applications all organizations must support: related internal administrative functions. Each of these application types has different needs ❙ Consumer engagement: Applications that provide data or services to consumers and (see Figure 1, next page). For consumer engagement determine the quality of their experience. applications, the key requirements are driving innovation and agility. For business differentiation ❙ : Applications that Business differentiation applications, performance improvement and provide business capabilities such as faster scalability are most vital. For systems of record, product launches, business workflows and resiliency and cost reduction are the primary enterprise resource planning (ERP). objectives. Tailoring management strategy to suit each application type delivers the greatest ROI. For consumer engagement applications, the key requirements are driving innovation and agility. For business differentiation applications, performance improvement and scalability are most vital. For systems of record, resiliency and cost reduction are the primary objectives. 3 / Tiered Application Management: Meeting the Need for Speed and Reliability Cognizant 20-20 Insights Different strokes Classification of Applications Outcomes Omnichannel Interactive systems > Innovation Mobile Consumer Engagement Apps > Agility BI & Identify & Fault Analytics Management Travel & Expense CRM Business Dierentiation > Performance > Scalability ERP Billing & Payments Virtual Assistants Payroll Product > Resiliency Islands of Applications Launch Systems of Record Utility > Cost Take-Out Business Workflows HR MIDDLEWARE/UTILITY INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY Figure 1 The first step: Identify application ❙ Contain: Applications that generate a stable relevance or low level of trouble tickets whose business value is decreasing and/or that are ripe for Categorizing the applications helps determine decommissioning. which deliver the most, and least, business value and which should be eliminated, retained, rewritten ❙ Maintain: Applications that continue to or moved to new platforms. The resulting simplified provide value to the business but that can be IT backbone helps to unlock business value, reengineered or re-hosted on lower cost or more streamline IT processes and align IT with business agile platforms. objectives. This helps meet the perennial need for ❙ Invest: Applications that will drive business lower costs through reduced management and growth, typically delivered through mobile, licensing overhead, powering a lean and flexible microservices/nanoservices1 and cloud-based organization that can deliver services quickly and platforms. efficiently. We recommend using three management Designing a CMI-based app categories – contain, maintain and invest (or CMI) — maintenance strategy to classify applications: The next step is using a predictive analytics framework to forecast future spending needs and the effect of such spending on the performance of consumer engagement, business differentiation 4 / Tiered Application Management: Meeting the Need for Speed and Reliability Cognizant 20-20 Insights Debt analytics framework Sample debt analytics Framework Report DEBT CATEGORY TECHNICAL DEBT OPERATIONAL DEBT FUNCTIONAL DEBT KNOWLEDGE DEBT Indicative % 50% 40% 5% 5% Avoidable : 50% 25% ü 20% ü 2% ü 3% ü Unavoidable : 46% 23% 19% 2% 2% Residual : 4% Levers “ZERO MAINTENANCE FRAMEWORK” ELIMINATE AUTOMATE SYNERGIZE INDUSTRIALIZE Top Categories > Defect/Code Fix > Access Request > Change Requests > User Guide/Manual > Data Issue/Fix > Vendor Request > New Feature > User Training > Report Issues > Invoice Request > Functionality Issues > Access Issues > Delete Request Transform for residual “debt” & “principal” management for enabling business growth. Figure 2 and systems of record applications. Our framework significantly helps to determine proprietary debt analytics framework categorizes sources of debt elimination and automation, operational excellence and service management and to minimize residual debt through gaps into technical, operational, functional and industrialization. knowledge debt. These debt categories are further ❙ Invest: This is the 20% of the portfolio classified into avoidable and unavoidable debt (see where time-to-market is critical. In addition Figure 2). to leveraging service management-based The output from this model defines how the CMI automation, organizations should incorporate strategy is implemented: build automation, end-to-end test automation and move to a DevOps continuous integration/ ❙ Contain: This is a quick source of savings, continuous delivery (CI/CD) model. They should because the operational team supporting this 40- also focus more on cloud-native application 50% of the application portfolio can provide only development, platform hosting services such “fix on fail” support and relies heavily on global as SAP S4 hosted on Microsoft Azure or AWS support. clouds, and deployment of low-code, serverless ❙ Maintain: This is a critical source of trouble architectures where newer apps are designed tickets and must be addressed with a three- and built for zero maintenance (i.e., self-healing prong strategy: eliminating trouble tickets applications that increase resiliency, availability wherever possible, automating tickets that cannot and throughput). The last step is to create be eliminated and industrializing all functions that full-stack development teams, whose roll is not cannot be automated in cooperation with other only to provide Kanban-based support but to functional units such as application development