What Is Application Lifecycle Management? ALM Made Clear

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is one of the foundational practices in Enterprise Architecture (EA) for IT governance, which enables IT to operate effectively. It encompasses the entire lifecycle of an application, from its inception to its retirement. Understanding and implementing Application Lifecycle Management provides data and insights that feed into Application Portfolio Management (APM). This contributes to ensuring applications are the right fit for the organization, optimizing productivity, and easing the management and maintenance burden for related products and services.

Jump to:

What Is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

Why is Application Lifecycle Management Important?

Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management

5 Stages of Application Lifecycle Management

Challenges of Application Lifecycle Management

What ALM Tools Are Available?

Begin Your Application Lifecycle Management Journey With Ardoq

What Is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

Application Lifecycle Management is the process of managing the applications an organization uses from their implementation to their eventual retirement or replacement. ALM provides a framework for setting requirements and ensuring governance before deploying software. ALM helps create a unified view of the entire application lifecycle, enabling organizations to effectively manage and control all stages of an application’s lifecycle, from choosing a system to retiring it.

But what is Application Lifecycle Management beyond a process? For organizations to plan effectively in the short and long term, they need to understand the lifecycle of their systems: when they were implemented, when they will be retired, and what will replace them. To collect this information accurately, it is important to have clear lines of responsibility between the systems and the people within the organization who are responsible for them.

Key Questions ALM Can Address:

• Who owns the critical systems and related components in the organization?
• What applications are being retired and implemented? Are there plans for replacement/migration?
• What will the application landscape look like in 6 months/1 year/5 years from now?
• Do all applications have clear lines of ownership/expertise?
• Where are all my applications located (On-Prem & SaaS)?
• Who uses the applications within my organization, and who is impacted if something goes wrong?

Application Lifecycle Management in relation to Application Portfolio Management (APM)

While Application Portfolio Management involves managing an organization's entire collection of applications, ALM focuses on managing the entire lifecycle of individual applications. Contributing to Application Portfolio Management best practices, ALM provides data and insights that feed into APM, and APM helps organizations prioritize applications and allocate resources accordingly. Both ALM and APM are useful Enterprise Architecture tools for ensuring an organization's application portfolio delivers maximum value.

How Application Lifecycle Management relates to Application Rationalization

Application Rationalization, one of the various objectives of APM, identifies applications that may need to be retired or modernized. This information can then be incorporated into the Application Lifecycle Management process. ALM provides insights, such as performance metrics and maintenance costs, that are essential for effective Application Rationalization.

What is ALM Used For?

ALM Application Lifecycle Management is used to improve the efficiency, quality, and predictability of the software an organization may develop, implement or use. One of the core functions of ALM is to establish a clear and compelling business case for each application prior to development. This involves identifying the problem that the application will solve, quantifying the expected benefits, and assessing the potential risks and costs. 

Continuous monitoring and maintenance are essential components of ALM. By tracking application performance, identifying potential issues, and implementing timely updates, organizations can proactively address risks and prevent costly downtime. This helps to protect against technology risks, such as hardware failures or software defects and ensures that applications remain secure and compliant with industry regulations.

ALM helps businesses increase the overall quality and efficiency of their IT landscape by improving these aspects:

Standardization and Consistency: ALM promotes the use of standardized processes, templates, and tools, ensuring consistency across the organization and reducing the risk of errors.

Visibility and Transparency: ALM provides real-time visibility into the status of projects, enabling stakeholders to track progress, identify potential issues, and make informed decisions.

Continuous Improvement: ALM fosters a culture of continuous improvement by providing metrics and analytics that can be used to identify areas for optimization and drive process enhancements.

Scalability: ALM solutions can be scaled to accommodate the needs of large enterprises with complex application portfolios, ensuring that the organization can effectively manage growth and change.

Why Is Application Lifecycle Management Important?

Application Lifecycle Management brings improved efficiency to the process of developing, implementing, and maintaining applications. It’s a collaborative process that works best when all stakeholders have visibility, and the transparency offered by Application Lifecycle Management plays a crucial role in achieving consistency.
Businesses are under constant pressure to improve performance and competitiveness by achieving greater operational efficiency, higher productivity, higher ROI, and more robust risk management. Given the central role of IT in modern business pressures, it’s imperative for IT teams to adopt tools and processes that support business performance.
ALM helps ensure software investment is aligned with business goals by clarifying the business use case and requirements of applications before their implementation. ALM also plays a vital role in mitigating challenges and enabling solutions to keep businesses competitive. By adopting ALM, businesses can improve efficiency and productivity, achieve higher ROI, and manage risk more effectively. 

Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management

Thanks to its numerous benefits, Application Lifecycle Management can have a significant and positive impact on an organization’s bottom line by reducing risks and improving governance.

1. Reduce technology risks

Good application lifecycle management ensures there is a plan for retirement so that when an application reaches its end-of-life, a successor is already in place. If this were not to happen, it could render applications that rely on the retired system unusable, impacting people and departments in the organization that depend on it. 

2. Mitigate security risks

Applications are constantly evolving. If left unmaintained, organizations can quickly become vulnerable to cyber or hardware attacks as they continue operating with legacy technologies. ALM empowers key stakeholders and IT teams to forecast and avoid security threats by identifying which applications require an update or elimination, looking for a replacement, and planning the next steps for upgrade or migration.

3. Reduce costs of upgrade and migration

It is tempting to avoid upgrade or migration costs, but the true cost of legacy applications far outweighs the initial investment. Legacy applications expose organizations to data breaches that cost large amounts of money every year to fix. Moreover, they can cause reputational damage, which also translates into financial losses as the company loses business to competitors. According to the Cost of Data Breach Report 2020 by the Ponemon Institute, data breaches can cost these organizations USD 3.86 million annually on average.

Another aspect to consider is the cost of hours spent on maintenance for legacy applications. Legacy applications require more time from your IT department as they suffer a higher failure rate. Your IT personnel are then forced to focus on responding to bugs, troubleshooting, integrating changes, or tracking down rare replacement parts that may even be discontinued, instead of concentrating on projects that increase business growth and operational efficiency.

5 Stages of Application Lifecycle Management

The application management lifecycle can be divided into several stages, depending on the specific methodology or framework being used. However, most ALM processes include the following key stages:

Stage 1: Evaluation

The evaluation phase marks the beginning of the ALM journey. It involves a comprehensive assessment of the business needs and the potential solutions. Key considerations during this stage include:

• Business Case: Developing a compelling business case that justifies the application's investment and aligns it with organizational goals.
• Requirements Gathering: Clearly defining the application's functional and non-functional requirements, ensuring they meet user needs and comply with regulatory standards.
• Technical Feasibility: Assessing the technical viability of the proposed solution, considering factors such as existing infrastructure, technology stack, and potential risks.
• Vendor Selection: Evaluating and selecting appropriate vendors or partners based on their expertise, experience, and alignment with organizational values.

Stage 2: Implementation

After evaluation, the implementation phase begins. This stage involves building and deploying the application. Key aspects to consider include:

• Testing: Rigorously testing the application to identify and address defects, ensuring it meets the defined requirements and performs as expected.
• Deployment: Deploying the application to the production environment, considering factors such as scalability, performance, and security.
• Management: Integrating with other applications and managing dependencies.

Stage 3: Live

The live phase marks the operational phase of the application, where it is used to deliver value to the business. Key management activities during this stage include:

• Monitoring: Continuously monitoring the application's performance, availability, and usage to identify and address issues proactively.
• Maintenance: Implementing regular maintenance activities, such as patching, upgrades, and configuration changes, to ensure the application remains secure and up-to-date.
• Support: Providing timely and effective support to users, addressing inquiries, and resolving issues efficiently.
• Optimization: Continuously optimizing the application's performance and resource utilization to maximize efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Application Register: This must be kept up to date through accurate information from application owners. Each application should have a clear owner who can maintain lifecycle information and work with EAs to evaluate application business and technical fit.

Stage 4: Phasing Out

As applications reach the end of their useful life or are replaced by newer solutions, the phasing-out phase becomes necessary. This involves a gradual transition to a new solution or discontinuation of the application. Key considerations include:

• Data Migration: Planning and executing the migration of relevant data to the new solution or archiving it securely.
• Communication: Effectively communicating the phasing-out plan to stakeholders, ensuring they are aware of the timeline and potential impacts.
• Deprecation: Gradually phasing out the application, ensuring that critical functionalities are still supported during the transition period.

Stage 5: Retired

The retired phase marks the final stage of the ALM lifecycle, where the application is no longer in use, and its resources are decommissioned. Key activities include:

• Roadmaps and Migration Plans: These need to be in place for retiring applications to ensure minimal impact on the organization.
• Decommissioning: Safely decommissioning the application's hardware, software, and infrastructure components.
• Data Retention: Ensuring compliance with data retention policies and securely destroying or archiving any sensitive data.
• Lessons Learned: Conducting a retrospective analysis to capture lessons learned from the application's lifecycle and inform future projects.

Ideally, when an application has reached its end-of-life and is retired, a successor should already be in place. Poor application lifecycle management can hinder this from happening and even make  applications unusable. This represents a huge risk for organizations, as it can impact entire departments whose day-to-day operations are dependent upon those applications.

Challenges of Application Lifecycle Management

While Application Lifecycle Management offers numerous benefits, several challenges can stem from visibility and operability at scale. Among these challenges are the following:

• Shadow IT: Unmapped IT that isn’t visible can be hard to track and can easily fall out of compliance, becoming vulnerable to security issues or a lack of support.
• Maintaining Application Data: The application register must be kept up to date with dates and lifecycle stages.
• Risk Quantification: Older applications can be thoroughly embedded in IT estate, appearing cheap to run and expensive to decommission. The risk of non-retirement needs to be quantified to make a compelling case for migration.
• Data Management: Managing the large amounts of data generated throughout the application lifecycle can be difficult, especially for organizations with distributed teams and multiple data sources.
• Governance: Ensuring that ALM processes are followed consistently and effectively can be challenging, especially in large organizations with multiple teams and stakeholders, and when applications and workloads are distributed across multi cloud and hybrid cloud platforms.
• Integration: Integrating ALM tools and processes with existing IT systems and workflows can be time-consuming and complex.
• Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating risks associated with software development and deployment can be challenging, particularly as part of complex projects.
  
  

What ALM Tools Are Available?

Application Lifecycle Management tools collate information on people, processes, and technologies to provide a comprehensive solution for managing the entire lifecycle of an application. The choice of ALM tools will depend on the specific needs of the organization, including the size and complexity of the application landscape, the budget, and the desired level of integration with existing IT systems.

A wide range of tools is available for organizations to take advantage of. These tools can be categorized into several broad categories:

• Requirements Management Tools: These tools help organizations gather, analyze, and document requirements for software applications.
• Configuration Management Tools: These tools help organizations manage the configuration of software components and environments.

While individual tools offer specific benefits, a more comprehensive platform, such as an Enterprise Architecture platform, makes it easier to derive insights and develop clearer overviews when dealing with complex systems of dependencies, stakeholders, data sources, etc.

A modern EA platform built on a graph database is the best way to build an accurate register of applications and information about them. This makes it easier to derive insights and develop clear overviews when dealing with complex systems of dependencies, stakeholders, and data sources.

Begin Your Application Lifecycle Management Journey With Ardoq

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a critical first step for organizations to gain control of their application portfolio. It helps ensure applications are well-managed, deliver value, and are aligned with business priorities.

Key steps include:

• Build an Application Repository: Establish a clear inventory of all applications in the IT estate to maintain visibility and control and manage unwanted risks.
• Track Lifecycle Stages: Identify where each application is in its lifecycle to plan upgrades. replacement or elimination, and prioritize investments, especially for those nearing the end of their lifecycle.
• Ensure Proper Governance: Govern applications throughout their lifecycle with regular reviews by application owners to confirm they deliver both business and technical value.
• Evaluate Application Risk: Use techniques outlined in Ardoq’s Application Risk Management solution to assess and mitigate risks effectively.

Ardoq is the ideal platform upon which to create ALM processes. Extensive functionality—including data sourcing and analytics, visualizations, dashboard creation, scenario modeling and more—gives insights into the key components of the application lifecycle.

Book a demo to find out why Ardoq is the leading tool for Application Lifecycle Management.

FAQs About Application Lifecycle Management

How Does ALM Relate to Enterprise Architecture?

Application Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Architecture (EA) are closely intertwined. EA provides a high-level blueprint for an organization's IT infrastructure, while ALM focuses on the development and management of individual applications. ALM plays a crucial role in realizing the goals and objectives defined by the EA.

Here's how ALM and EA interact:

• Alignment: ALM ensures that applications are aligned with the overall EA strategy and roadmap.
• Standards and Guidelines: EA provides standards and guidelines for application development, which ALM processes follow.
• Integration: ALM helps ensure that applications are integrated with other systems and components within the Enterprise Architecture.
• Governance: EA establishes governance frameworks and policies that ALM processes must adhere to.

How Does Application Lifecycle Management Address Application Security?

ALM plays a critical role in addressing application security. By incorporating security practices throughout the application lifecycle, organizations can reduce the risk of security breaches and protect sensitive data.

Here's how ALM addresses application security:

• Security Requirements: ALM ensures that security requirements are identified and incorporated into the application design and development process.
• Security Testing: ALM includes security testing activities to identify and address vulnerabilities in the application.
• Patch Management: ALM helps organizations manage patches and updates to address security vulnerabilities in applications.
• Access Control: ALM ensures that access to applications is restricted to authorized users.
• Data Protection: ALM helps organizations protect sensitive data by implementing appropriate security measures.

How Does ALM Support Legacy System Management in Enterprise Architecture?

• Modernization: ALM can support the modernization of legacy systems by identifying opportunities for improvement and implementing changes in a controlled and managed manner.
• Migration: ALM can help organizations migrate legacy systems to new platforms or technologies.
• Maintenance: ALM can help organizations maintain legacy systems by providing ongoing support, updates, and patches.
• Retirement: ALM can help organizations plan for the retirement of legacy systems and develop strategies for transitioning to new systems.

Can ALM Help in Managing Application Portfolios?

Yes, ALM can help organizations manage their application portfolios by:

• Prioritization: helping organizations prioritize applications based on business value and risk.
• Optimization: helping organizations optimize their application portfolio by identifying opportunities for consolidation, modernization, or retirement.
• Governance: helping organizations establish governance policies and procedures for managing their application portfolio.
• Cost Management: helping organizations manage the costs associated with their application portfolio by identifying opportunities for cost reduction.

By effectively managing their application portfolios, organizations can improve their IT efficiency, reduce costs, and better support their business objectives.