Digital business is all about leveraging the digital tools to enhance business productivity. When it comes to digital tools that contribute to the widened reach of a company, applications are certainly at the forefront. Enabling businesses to connect with the audience with a customized approach, applications hold great prominence in the digital business.
It is essential to understand that apps need to be managed throughout their lifecycle. Your responsibility doesn’t end with developing an application for a brand. Application support and maintenance is a continuous process that enables you to increase its potentials constantly. So, every business has to prioritize the need for application management.
What is Application Management?
We can put application management in more straightforward terms by defining it as a process of managing all your applications throughout its life cycle. The traditional concept of application management means how a business application is developed, managed, optimized for the betterment of the company. It is essential to understand that without proper application support and maintenance, businesses cannot put it to optimal use.
Why Do You Need To Think About Application Management?
There are plenty of reasons to think about app management that makes it an integral part of digital marketing strategies. Take a look at some essential benefits of application management-:
Increased Productivity
Applications are the source of revenue for the company. So, when you focus on efficient app management, it will eventually affect the productivity of the business.
Improved Performance
It is not necessary that your application will always remain functioning and efficient. It depends on proper application support that decides its performance. It is important to follow application management to ensure optimal performance.
Stability
Applications might encounter problems that are hard to operate without a reliable application management system. Hence, it is essential to have efficient application support and management to ensure the stability of the application.
Phases of Application Management Lifecycle
App management is a continuous process that needs to be followed throughout its life cycle. There are six phases of application management according to the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)-:
Gathering Requirements
It is the first phase of app management that involves identifying the functional and business requirements that will help in changing the applications. In this phase, the IT works along the company to gather all the requirements. Gathering requirements is the most crucial part of app management. It is essential to crucially follow the first phase in order to ensure the functionality of other phases as well.
Design
The next phase is all about designing, wherein the team will translate all the acquired requirements into a technical solution. Developers use IT planners and simulation tools for assessing long-term conditions. Total Cost of Ownership study is also followed in this particular phase that helps in identifying the development and other support costs. The final reports of TCO are discussed with the business to make further changes.
Build
This phase mainly focuses on application coding and testing procedures. During this phase, flows and components of the application are developed and tested. This phase helps the developers to detect the early development adversities and take necessary actions at the right time. Developers also use performance monitoring software to gather real-time data during the testing process.
Deploy
It is one of the crucial phases when the application needs to roll out. Initially, it is released into production libraries. The deploying phase is pretty straightforward as the building phase will take over the complexities. Once the application is deployed, it will go through customer testing to enhance its efficiency.
Operate
After the deploying, the applications will be out there for customers. Operating phase majorly includes the day-to-day care and feeding given the application. This phase typically addresses a few things, including, noticing the changes, fixing the errors, monitoring the progress and reporting the app performance. One of the critical processes in the operating phase is to minimize the changes in the application.
Optimize
Last and the most crucial phase is optimizing that will continue throughout the lifecycle of the application. Both functional and performance optimization are adhered to in the optimizing period. Optimizing phase majorly consists of three steps: identifying any scope for improvement opportunities, simplify the application management by detecting issues, and ensure the flow of the process.
Conclusion
Application management is the core component of businesses’ digital marketing strategy. It is essential to prioritize the need for app management to fine-tune the application at a regular interval. It is not only the development and implanting phase that matters, continuously tweaking it according to the dynamic market situation and business objective also falls in the category of app management.
The above mentioned were some vital details regarding the significance of application management in the businesses.
Mphasis 