Application Lifecycle Management. From Business Need to Business Value.

Application lifecycle management is dealing with the management of an application over its entire lifetime – from the needs of the stakeholders to operation and right up to discontinuation. Digitization is ushering in a number of deep changes in many companies – changes that affect business processes and models as well as products. IT departments need to respond with new and adjusted systems faster than ever before. The goal is clear: To identify the business needs and to turn them into value for the stakeholders and the company. This requires communication, cooperation and mutual understanding between business and the IT department. When dealing with ALM, it is important that the pathway from the needs phase to the final IT system or product is transparent and traceable for all participants. You can achieve this with systematic application lifecycle management (ALM).

Your stakeholders’ goals and requirements drive the application lifecycle – the requirements are derived from the business needs. Requirements engineering models like SysML and UML diagrams or text-orientated recording with forms can be used for the analysis of stakeholders and their goals. An important aspect of application lifecycle management is being able to handle requirements, changes and priorities flexibly. The technique with the least overhead – known as scaling – consists of implementing multiple teams who work independently of each other in terms of content, but synchronized in time periods. Transparency and traceability of the results are just as important – secured in the practical application of ALM with tools that offer realtime repositories with multiple query and evaluation possibilities, as well as intergrated version management and configuration management for all artifacts of the application lifecycle.