How to Automate Application Lifecycle Management: Conclusions From New HP Book on Gaining Improved Business Applications

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the third in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement. Complexity, silos of technology and culture, as well as the shifting landscape of applications’ delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications’ approaches in large organizations.

In the book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors pursue the role and impact of automation and management over applications, as well as delving into the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

In this podcast, the last in a series of three, we'll underscore the conclusions from the book and explain how organizations can begin now to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast-changing world.

In our first podcast, we focused on the role and impact of automation and management of applications, and emphasized the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

The second discussion in our series looked at how an enterprise, Delta Air Lines, moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications.

Finally, here we'll discover how to access and how well you can develop applications as an essential lifecycle core competency and begin to chart a course toward improvement. That's just in time because the topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona.

But we're here now with the book’s authors to explore their conclusions. Please join me in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome to you both.

Mark Sarbiewski: Thank you.

Brad Hipps: Thank you.

Gardner: We're now at the point where organizations recognize that they need to do something differently. They have a very complex application situation, and they certainly have a fast-changing set of business requirements. The stakes are very high.

How then do companies know where they are in the app spectrum? Obviously, there’s going to be variability from company to company. Yet how do you know as an individual organization where you stand in terms of application lifecycle competencies? Let’s start with you, Mark.

ALM maturity

Sarbiewski: Companies are truly interested to understand where they rank, what they do well, where their gaps are, and where they fall against their competition, their colleagues, or other folks in their industry, and even against best practice in other industries. So we built out a model for ALM maturity, and it’s in the book.

We wanted to take a slightly different approach to how we thought about maturity models. There are lots of them in the industry, not so much around ALM, but in sub-disciplines or in different areas. Our focus was the business outcomes that you see at different levels.

If you can understand the results that you are seeing, that ought to help you figure out where am I in terms of where I could be. What we've seen is a progression from the spectrum of companies, where they are really getting started. They have fairly immature processes. They're across the lifecycle of an application, and all the way up to very advanced.

One thing I would mention, before I go further, is that the life of an application is generally the same for all companies. There is a spark of an idea: "We need this. We need software to help us do something in the business."

We make an investment decision somehow. We may do this ad hoc. We may do it based on who screams the loudest. But, somehow a decision gets made. We build something somehow. We spec it, build it, release it, run it, poorly or not, and hopefully, although certainly not always, eventually we replace it, retire it, and so forth.

So, our idea around maturity and tying it to outcomes is the results that we see. For example, what’s our batting average for how many times we actually make the right kind of investment decisions? How many times do we execute against a good investment decision? How many times do we run it well and meet our SLAs in production and so on?

We see people just getting started, and they have a relatively ad hoc, narrow, point tool, with lots of manual work. It doesn’t mean they are never successful, but results vary highly. They're very mixed. Some project teams are great, and it all depends on the project team, and the next one may stink.

As you move up the curve, you start to see a maturity in the functional disciplines. We see them get better at requirements management. We see them get better at testing, designing software, or handing off, releasing into production. You see the functional competence begin to evolve. That has to happen first, before you can start to tie these functions together and begin to get cross-functional excellence.

There is a huge benefit in getting good at your functions. And, there is another big jump in return on investment (ROI) of getting better at having my functions and departments work well together. At the highest level, you start to be able to execute very complex programs, with lots of projects, across lots of functions every time. We talk about a level of portfolio excellence there.

So, it all comes back to the results. What kind of results am I seeing? If you look at the model in the book, it’s pretty easy to peg yourself as to where you are and the kinds of benefits you'd see from moving up that maturity curve.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, do you have anything to offer further on knowing where you are so that you can know where you need to go?

More of a scorecard

Hipps: As Mark has said, we configured this model, trying deliberately not to be ultra-prescriptive. There are many heavy-duty models that do exist, and people can dig into those to their heart’s content. This is as much a maturity scorecard as anything.

One of the examples that you might see or one of the ways you might begin to engage yourself is something like defect leakage. Defect leakage refers to the number of defects that you discover in live in the application that you could have caught earlier.

We have some figures that show that the average is in the neighborhood of 40 percent of application defects that leak into production and are discovered in live. They could have been caught earlier. It may be little higher than 40 percent, which is a fairly shocking number. Obviously, that’s a rough average. So, you've got to expect, if you are lower in maturity, that you may be even seeing more than that.

But on the high end, the world-class customers we worked with, see less than 5 percent of defects working their way into production. So right off the bat there, you're talking an 80 percent-plus drop in the number of defects that you're experiencing in a live environment, with all the attendant cost savings, brand improvement, and good will in the business that you would expect.

That’s one example of the kind of thing that you can look at, tease out, and begin to get a sense of where might I sit maturity wise. From that, you can potentially take a cue as to where is it that I want to start, where is it that I want to make the biggest investment, as I look to make myself more mature?

There are hosts of sophisticated KPIs we can design for ourselves, but one of the key ones was, "I want to know what the business thinks of us, and whether we are trending in the right direction."

Gardner: Brad, I suppose while it’s important to know who you are in order to chart where you are going to go, it would be nice to know how well you are doing along the way. Are there measurements of success here in your book that you can point to of how people can take score of how well they are progressing and then reinforce or move even further forward?

Hipps: I'll give a simple one. At least, I hope it’s a simple. I can’t speak for every enterprise, but this is one that I have used in my own history, and it’s no more complex than customer satisfaction.

In this case, your customers may be end users, who are harder sometimes to survey. But, more often than not, your customers are some business units, somebody within the business.

When I was running application teams, we were undertaking initiatives to improve ourselves, which is probably a nonstop undertaking within IT. Sometimes, you go through peaks and valleys, but that became one of my key checkpoints, as you might imagine. There are hosts of sophisticated KPIs we can design for ourselves, but one of the key ones was, "I want to know what the business thinks of us, and whether we are trending in the right direction."

Trumping the frustration

The reason that’s a good one for is that no amount of being a good guy, being nice to people, or being friendly in meetings, is going to trump the frustration a business person feels if the application is not doing what they need it to do. Either it's got too many defects, it takes too long to enhance it, or it’s too painful to get anything done, etc. There are a host of things.

So, we designed a relatively simple customer survey. It was something we executed, probably biannually, and that became one of the ways we tracked how we were trending. Are we going in the right direction? There are endless, complex KPIs, but that’s a simple one I would pluck out as being a way of simply tracking, "Are we getting better or worse, or are we just sort of treading water?"

Gardner: And, Mark, when we look at how progress has been made, we need not only look at the end-user perceptions and results from surveys, but perhaps we also need to look at the development team, the ops team, and the actual practitioners here. So, is there a way of gauging success based on what the team does and how well they're able to let go of the legacy mechanisms they've had over the years?

Sarbiewski: We talk about this a lot. We see pressure from the business to change how we do things and the technologies we use. From the business side, you see it in a variety of ways. You see, "Oh, it’s the consumerization of IT, and what I see in my consumer world I want in IT. I see this all moving fast and I don’t feel my business moving." You see that pressure.

But, you absolutely see pressure to change from the bottom-up, from the teams themselves. We want to work in a different way. We want to be able to execute faster. The whole move of agile has been, in large part, if not primarily built, then driven from development and delivery teams up. So, there is a huge motivation there.

You can start to look at some things like that, and as you see improvement, not only in the responsiveness, but the as number of issues go down.

And they are going to look at a variety of things. They are going to look at things, as Brad said, like customer satisfaction as part of that. How quickly does a change and a request get turned around?

That’s a pretty easy metric, because the changes come into systems like the service desk. There's a request. When did that thing get requested, and when did it actually get executed? You can start to look at some things like that, and as you see improvement, not only in the responsiveness, but the as number of issues go down, those are things that the team should be looking at as great measurements.

I often counsel clients to set up some MBOs and some rewards structures around that too, because this is something that the business is going to feel. It’s not just what’s there at release. What did we find here and how is it? It’s really that first 90 or 180 days of use in the business. I'm going to take a snapshot, and if it’s good, if we are constantly improving on that and hitting our targets, that’s where we get our bonuses.

It’s that result. And it shifts it from, I hit my date, I threw it over the wall to ops, and I washed my hands of it. No. We're all in business here. We're not in IT. We're in business, and business means this thing is running like it’s supposed to. That means apps and ops combining and taking a measure at 180 days.

There’s a lot of pride when you see the metrics go in the right way. The feedback that I've seen for our clients that do this really well is where the business comes back and says, "Oh my God. The responsiveness is incredible. Even if I'm not getting the massive stuff that I used to get once every two years, I'm seeing movement on a regular basis, and I love it." And lot of clients that we talk to are really fired up about that.

Those are the kinds of things to strive for, look for, and really have a great feedback loop for on your delivery teams.

Important points

Hipps: There's an important point there. As people know, there are an endless numbers of KPIs that are available to you, and all sorts of people who recommend which ones are the best. We probably didn’t make it this explicit in this version of the book, and maybe this goes in the next revision, but when it comes to how you're going to measure your success, I'd look at a few things in terms of the kinds of measurements you want to track.

First of all, I don’t know that I would pick more than three or four. You find yourself with six, seven, eight different things you are trying to stay on top of and measure, and it becomes its own game. I would keep it as simple as humanly possible. Three is a nice number of measurements.

The second thing is, I would want it to be pretty doggone intuitive what the business value is, if we are doing well in the measurement. I wouldn’t want to have to go through too many mathematical steps to get back to what the value is to the business, as I look at whatever measurement I have chosen to evaluate myself by.

The third aspect would get to what Mark was just saying was in an ideal world at least one of the measurements, if not all of them, and would speak to how well we're working pan IT. It's not just how well we're building the application or how quickly we're getting it pushed into operations hands, but how well we're working together as teams, as developers, as folks on the operation side, as planners, and as enterprise architects.

Mark was talking about looking at meantime from change request to production. Well, that's an example of the entire IT supply chain right there. Presumably, if I set some relatively easy target and start trending in that direction, then I can have at least some sense of satisfaction. We must be getting better about interoperating the way we didn’t operate.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Gardner: Thanks, Brad. Back to your conclusion in your book, you not only try to explain how people can assess their own progress, but you also look to what you consider world-class delivery organizations and try to learn from what they do well.

You have four traits that you point out, predictability, repeatability, quality, and change readiness. Mark, maybe you could drill into these and explain why these proved to be so important for these top players?

Sarbiewski: We've done numerous surveys, there are lots of other surveys out there about what the business is asking of these application teams and of IT in general. For the last couple of years, it's been pretty consistent. Surprisingly, to some degree, agility and innovation are right at the top of the list. Cost is up there in third place in our surveys. So, it's hugely important, but it's not the first thing, and that's almost a little counter-intuitive.

What we hear from our clients is that things are hyper-competitive and that technology, in particular software and applications, is a huge competitive advantage. So, our ability to move fast and beat our competitors to the punch with capability is enormously important.

You turn that around. Suppose I'm an application executive and I own this problem. How am I going to deliver that to the business? I've done all kinds of things to try to make that happen. I've brought in automation. I'm bringing management. I'm outsourcing to drive cost down. I'm adopting new technologies for this rich experience. I'm introducing a whole host of change to meet those business objectives.

Have to deliver

But, at the end of the day, I've to be able to deliver every time. I got to be able to know when I'm going to deliver. That's absolutely critical to it -- to deliver agility. What it means to me as an App owner is that I'm ready to make change. And that's a big statement.

So the change readiness comes in. Have I architected for change? It's not just that my people are ready for it, my processes are good for that, my software itself is changeable, and I have automation where I can make a change and know if I have broken something else.

I'm trying to deliver that innovation and agility for the business. I've introduced a whole host of things to be against that, and I have to manage this in an extraordinary way, in a different way than I've done this in the past. What's going to help me to be able to predict where I'm going to land, repeat this for every project I get, and be change ready and not sacrifice quality.

I've to do all that and keep quality high. Those becomes the North Star principles that I want to keep my team focused on and thinking about how things like being change ready are facilitating the agility that the business wants.

Gardner: Brad, change ready really resonates, nowadays. We've got cloud computing in many people's minds as something important for them to be focused on. We've got mobile computing and how that impacts enterprises and their processes. And we're looking more at sort of the social business with collaboration and rich sharing of data and information.

They're always on. There is nothing I can do in a business that isn't going to touch the application.

So. change readiness seems to be the norm or perhaps am I overstating that?

Hipps: No, I think that's right. Speaking from the application domain, our friends in the agile communities have been the leading champions of this notion for a long time in applications. Our default stand was one of being change averse.

By that, I mean that there was this whole contractual relationship with business. You tell us what you need, and we're going to document it as best as we can, down to having all the semicolons in the right place.

We're going to break out the quill pens and ink our signatures. Forever shall it be, and if you change anything here, we're going to hit you with the request for change, and it will go through a cycle of six weeks and maybe we'll agree to it, etc., etc. The longest time was the mindset. You can look at that and say it's awful, but when I had far fewer applications, and they took far longer to build, it was just the way of the world.

The recognition today for all of the reasons we've talked about in this podcast and others, our applications are everywhere. They're always on. There is nothing I can do in a business that isn't going to touch the application. It fundamentally means, we need to sweep from the table, that notion of being change averse. Instead, we need to be in a position of embracing change. We do need to be change ready.

It's not that the business is going to sit back and say, "You're right. We're sorry. We won't ask for so many changes." This isn't going to happen. From an IT, from an app perspective, we need to be oriented and positioned, rather than see change as something that we need to fear or protect ourselves from. It needs to be something we need to embrace as a fact of life.

The leading traits

As Mark said, we need to be architected and engineered, from our people process technology perspective, to put ourselves in a position to be that way. In the book, we talk a bit about some of the principles we think come into play for change ready organizations. But, that's why it is one of the leading traits, the leading principles, in world-class organizations.

Gardner: Okay, we've talked about an awful lot, and this book encompasses an awful lot. It might be difficult for people to get a handle on where to start, but you've addressed that as well. You've conceptualized this along three lines: think big, start small, and then scale quickly and adapt. Let's go through these. Let’s start with you Brad. Think big -- what does that mean?

Hipps: It could be a mantra of sorts, Think big, start small, scale quickly. The basic idea of think big is the idea that you want to spend some time making sure that you’ve all got a shared vision of where you want to be, and we talk a bit about whether that was a maturity model -- these principles of predictability and repeatability, etc.

Hopefully we've set at least some suggested guidelines for constructing what your end state might look like. But, this point about thinking big is that, as we all know, certainly in IT but probably anywhere, it's every easy to fall into a state of analysis paralysis. We've got to figure out exactly the right metrics to decide exactly what we're going to be. We've got to figure out precisely what our time line is.

We sort of can borrow from our friends in agile, who have said that you've got to understand the perimeter of what it is you want to accomplish, but it's bound to change. Those perimeters are bound to shift. You're bound to discover things about yourselves, your organizations, what's feasible, and what's not in the process of actually trying to get there.

It's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

So, it's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

If, you then pluck the low-hanging fruit, the easy things we could do starting this week, starting tomorrow, to advance us at least generally toward these ends, this end objective, that's great. Then, it becomes a matter of just continuing to move, scale, and adapt.

Somewhere, we make the point that, as an application team, certainly at least as an application member, I cared a lot more about measurable progress, seeing things actually advancing and getting better. Then, I cared less about how shiningly brilliant the end-state was going to be or exactly how we were going to get there.

I was far more interested in generally getting a sense of what our North Star was, and then getting going, and actually seeing progress. So that, in a nutshell, is what we mean when we say, think big, start small, scale quickly and adapt.

Gardner: Mark, any further thoughts on this philosophical approach to this issue about the lifecycle of application?

Unconscious sabotage

Sarbiewski: Absolutely. I spent a number of years in a former life doing process change for companies. There were some trade secretes in the firm I worked with. They recognized some unchanging facts that that people can consciously or unconsciously sabotage the greatest plans, any process you want, or any kind of a change.

You have to start with people. It does involve all the people-process-technology in that order, but it's the people considerations. Do we have that shared vision? Who are the skeptics? Where do we think this could go wrong? Are we committed to getting there?

There were some questions we’d as we were embarking on making this change. First of all we said, what project or what pilot -- if we did these changes on it -- would people in the organization say, "If it works for that project, it will work for us as an organization."

So, find that visible pilot project, not one that’s an exception. Don’t find one where there are four developers and they are in the same room. If you try something new, people can say, "Well, of course, it worked for that, but that’s so atypical." So, find that project.

Beyond that, find the champion who is really respected in the organization, but skeptical of the change. We would go looking for one or two people who were open-minded enough to really give it a go, but maybe steeped in how we’ve done it, and have been very successful in how we’ve done it. Then, people can say, "That’s the kind of project we do, so you need to be able to make it work there. If Joe or Mary or whoever it is, if they buy into and it works for them, I believe."

The one other thing I’d say is start thinking about those types of metrics, those cross-silo and lifecycle-oriented goals and metrics.

The one other thing I’d say is start thinking about those types of metrics, those cross-silo and lifecycle-oriented goals and metrics. We talked about ones just a bit ago where we reward our delivery teams after six months of being live. Maybe, let's reward jointly the operations and the dev teams, if they’ve met those customer satisfaction goals, those service level agreements (SLAs), and those low counts of defects in production. You start to create a different dynamic, when you think more about lifecycle goals and cross-team goals.

Gardner: Now, I know these books involve a tremendous amount or work, and it’s something you really have to pour your heart into. Brad, the last question to you. What do you hope happens as a result of this book?

Hipps: The spirit of this book, and probably the spirit of a lot of these kinds of books, is that our hope is that somebody gets this book, and maybe doesn’t read it cover to cover. That’s okay. They pick and choose their places, but they take away one idea that’s actually implementable. If I have one hope, it’s that we haven’t been so pie-in-the-sky in our thinking that somebody reads this and says, "Yeah, nice idea, but it will never happen here."

So, that would be my hope -- somebody takes one single way that’s implementable in the near term within their organization.

Gardner: And in fairness I should offer the same question to you, Mark. What do you hope happens as a result of the book?

Sarbiewski: Do you mean not The New York Times bestseller list. I can’t hope that.

Gardner: Regardless of its reach.

Software is important

Sarbiewski: What I’m hoping is that in these hundred or so odd pages that executives in these enterprises that we're talking to have that opportunity to take just a couple hours and have somebody give them a chance to think about how important software is, and what the true life of an application is.

Once you start to go down that path and you start to say, wait a minute, 10, 15 years of evolving this capability, what does that mean? When things are live and I’ve got hot request from the business to make a change, what needs to happen? How much money will I spend on that?

The one "aha" moment is seeing that the 12 to 15 years matter, when I’m delivering value to the business and innovating for the business. In order to be successful during those 10 to 15 years, I will make different decisions when I build this thing. I will focus on a process.

I will build the automation to a different level, because I’ve stopped thinking that my job is done when I go live. If that’s truly the job, you’ll make a lot of shortcut decisions to get to go live. But, if you think bigger, you think about the full life of an application and what it delivers to the business. All of a sudden, it makes a whole lot more sense to do things a bit differently, to set myself up for 10 years or 15 years of success with the business, as opposed to a moment when I can say, "Yup, I achieved a milestone."

Gardner: Very good, but we have to leave it there. We’ve been examining how our shifting applications and IT landscape provided a huge opening from proving how applications are built, consumed, and managed using new application lifecycle management methods and concepts.

I want to thank our guests, the authors of our book that we’ve been discussing. We’re here with Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Thanks so much, Mark.

Sarbiewski: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Brad Hipps, Product Marketing Manager for HP Applications. Thanks to you, Brad.

Hipps: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: This is the last in the series of three podcasts on ALM; we’re examining a new book on the subject, The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle. It offers some powerful methods retaining overall business services delivery improvement. Thanks for joining our series, and we hope you have a chance to get the book and examine it in more detail.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the third in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement. Complexity, silos of technology and culture, as well as the shifting landscape of applications’ delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications’ approaches in large organizations.

In the book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors pursue the role and impact of automation and management over applications, as well as delving into the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

This is the second (read more about and access the first podcast) in the series of three podcasts on the "Application Lifecycle Management" book. We're here with the authors, but we are also here to learn about how one enterprise, Delta Air Lines, has moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality and impact and to better deliver real business results from those applications.

We will hear Delta story from two IT executives there and gain the reactions to the new application life cycle book’s findings. So please join me now welcoming our panel, David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta’s eCommerce IT Group, and John Bell, Senior Test Engineer in the eCommerce IT Group at Delta.

David Moses and John Bell: Thanks for having us.

Gardner: And we're joined by book’s authors, Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solution Marketing at HP Applications. Welcome back, Brad and Mark.

Mark Sarbiewski and Brad Hipps: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Before we get into Delta’s experience, for our listeners, I'd like to explain a bit more about the book. Mark, what were the driving needs or necessities that prompted you to write this and then perhaps get into some of the high-level takeaways and bindings?

Combination of factors

Sarbiewski: It really is a combination of factors, but the headline for me is that, more than ever, business moves as software moves; as your website moves, as your ERP system is advanced, your supply chain, and your financials.

Businesses are driven so much by software now that it's really the long pole in the tent. Standing up infrastructure is a necessity. Potentially, it can be done really fast. How quickly can I innovate on my capabilities for my customers or my internal users?

So, business moves as software moves. When we look at how we've done over the last 10 or 15 years, I could sum it by saying that legacy applications and approaches are just too slow. Not only are they too slow, they are too costly. They're riddled with security holes, which are increasing the challenges out there.

So, we have this dynamic that the business needs to move faster. Software is a prime driver in innovating for the business, and where we've been is simply too slow. We need to rethink our approach across the board, because there is no one silver bullet. It really boils down to I have to leverage the latest technologies for things like reuse, where I get huge leverage for richer customer experiences that need those wonderful new web application technologies that we have.

I have new processes that I can leverage in forms of agile and iterative types of things. To keep the cost in line. I really want to be able to leverage global teams for flexible low cost, but expert resources around the globe. I want them acting as if they were all local, like a dynamic Tiger Team that was all local.

That’s a lot of change to make happen to serve the ultimate business needs. We took the opportunity to take a step back and ask how all these things come together and how you can blend this modern approach to really deliver what you need to deliver for the business.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, do you have anything to offer in terms of what people will take away from the book?

Hipps: A lot of it is the chance to take a step back and have a bit of brain space to consider and contemplate a lot of things Mark just touched on -- what are these ramifications for my organization?

Nine times out of 10, most of us who are in IT developing applications, trying to get on top of what it is the business wants, don't generally have the luxury of taking a step back and asking has the ground shifted underneath my feet with regard to all the things I am now expected to do and the ways I am expected to do them, whether that’s process shifts, organizational shifts, or technology shifts.

Generally the case is that the ground has shifted. Am I equipped, organized, and oriented to respond effectively to all these changes? That’s one of the driving factors of the book and one of the hopes that gives people a chance to step back, contemplate what these changes have been, and also give a bit of guidance about how we might better get on top of these changes and really wring the benefit out of them that we had expected when we first began to make them.

Gardner: Let's go to David Moses at Delta Air Lines. This isn’t just academic now. This is something probably near and dear to you in your day-in and day-out activities. Maybe you could sum up for us quickly what it is that you are doing there at Delta and why your customer-facing applications are so important to your business.

Innovating for customers

Moses: The biggest thing that we have at Delta is to make sure that we innovate for our customers and give them the latest greatest ability to take control of their situation. If somebody wants to book a flight, they should be able to do it on any media they like.

We want them to be able to make it in as few clicks as possible and as little typing as possible. We really want to make it as convenient for the customer and through the entire experience from the inspiration, all the way to when they are back home. We want to deliver quality products to them.

That comes down to innovation and speed, because you can innovate for ever and never actually release the product. For us, getting it out the door is very, very important. Some of the things that we've heard already from Mark and Brad touch on the need to back away, get out the weeds, and look at your overall lifecycle to make sure that you can get that speed. A lot of times, if you're doing the status quo over and over again, you never realize how fast you can be. So, you raise your head up, look around, and try to make some big changes.

Gardner: John Bell, what do you see as some of the hurdles that you need to continue to get over, in order to get into that innovation and speed? What are some of the complications that are typical, when you're trying to move these applications fast, but you also need to make them of a high quality?

Bell: One of the things that’s really important to us is that we work with multiple vendors in multiple locations and with multiple time zones. It's important to make sure that all of them are using the same processes and that we're all using the overall tools. We use quality center personally to help organize a lot of the requirements and things like that in our testing efforts.

It's important that all of our vendors, whether it's in-house or people outside, are giving us the same processes and that we are able to leverage any of our automation or any of our business process testing or any of those tools, and that we can actually deliver high quality software quickly, can reduce our turnaround time, make sure that we're giving customers their best experience, and that we are getting our time to market in a timely manner.

Gardner: David Moses, we heard a lot of in the book about automation and management and then integrating those as much as possible. Maybe you could give me some perspective on that higher level ability to excel at applications, multiple applications with rapid iteration, but not lose control, and not let the complexity lead to chaos.

It's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really streamlining.

Moses: Complexity is always the enemy of speed and innovation, isn’t it? The idea is to make it as simple as possible by having one version of the truth. You really have to get to that point, a central repository of data, a central tool that everyone can use. As John said, we use Quality Center. We keep everything in that, requirements, tough cases, automation. We pull scripts and things from there for our test plans. We have one area with all that data, so all of our areas can come to that and pull that information.

Whenever somebody needs to start up a script or anything like that, they’ve got a library that they can pull from. They can bring it into their project. When they are done with their manual testing and they place their test plan back in the library, John can then take those pieces and immediately automate them.

Somebody once said they required a form to find out who they were going to, or what pieces they were going to automate. For us, if you have one version of the truth, you know when things are checked back in. You know when your test plan has been updated and your automation people can make that decision. So, it's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really streamlining.

Gardner: Also, David, when you have a lifecycle mentality, you can fall back to that single system of record for the application process. You can extend that not beyond just the development test and deploy phases. It’s something that probably benefits the operation side, maintaining, iterating, and improving on that app over time.

State of the application

Moses: Definitely. It's a great tool, because everyone has access to it. Everyone from our business side people to our IT side, our operations people, can look in this and see exactly what state the application is in at any time. They've got that snapshot. They can go in and determine what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.

Gardner: John or David, I don't know which of you would be more comfortable, but can you tell us a bit of about the recent development activity, maybe moving towards multiple devices or entry points for customers. I know that's important to me when I fly. Tell us about the way that you have been executing on this innovation, maybe relating that back to some of the principles in the ALM book.

Moses: Recently, we've brought in some of the mobile devices like the iPhone and some of those types of applications. In the past, a large number of our customers have always been using the .com form. Now, we're finding more and more users are going towards the mobile devices.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

We wanted to make sure that a lot of the applications lifecycle testing we had done with the .com could also be used with the mobile. We were able to take automation and a lot of the test cases and type things we had used with .com and use it with mobile.

We did write automation associated with mobile and were also able to bring that back into Quality Center, running that via Quick Test Pro. Even though mobile was a newer area for us, we were able to get the speed to market up on that as soon as possible.

Also, we were able to leverage that and use some of those automated scripts. We run those on a daily basis against our production mobile environment. If something is wrong with that, we know early in the morning. We run these scripts early in the morning before we come in, and we can know right away if something is there.

They can go in and determine what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.

So we were able to take the lifecycle information and the wins that we have got from the .com, and bring that into our mobile apps, and it's really helped us a lot. Our speed to market has significantly improved with that.

Bell: Another case would be our new homepage. We're sitting here at the end of October 2010. About a month ago, we released a new, more streamlined homepage, a lot more innovative. A lot of people looked at that. We hid the logo during usability testing, and people were surprised to find out it was an airline website. They thought of us as one of the cool guys out there in the travel world.

We're getting much better in this area. By using all the feedback that we get from the customers, importing information in the Quality Center, tracking everything that we have in there, we were able to look at what we needed to make changes to. Once we released this, it was something that the customers were wanting, so it got a lot of good response.

Gardner: Mark Sarbiewski at HP, tell me as you are listening to these gentlemen discuss their efforts, how would some of the principles from the book help. It sounds to me as if it was very complex going mobile or recasting your website. It could slow things down. It sounds like because they took the proper steps, and it actually fell right into the place.

Getting visibility

Sarbiewski: One of the keys that I heard them talking about here is giving everyone visibility into not just the state of where things are, but the next things that have to happen. One of the important things that to tease out of those kinds of statements is the integration of the management information. What are the requirements, which have been covered? What remain? What tests have been run? What defects are found against what code?

There are a million things that happen to progress that project along. When a test fails, a bunch of stuff has to happen. You've got to go find that and fix that. In all those granular activities, there's a huge opportunity for lag, mis-communication, finger-pointing, claiming it's not a defect, and all that.

When you have a system that pulls everybody together like that and gives a real-time view, it really helps to advance the work forward as well. I also heard them talking about how tying automation into that management system allowed them to do a cool website, that Web 2.0 feel, very slick with a rich user experience, which is a must today, as well as mobile, which is a must, without slowing things down.

To me the translation: Enormous competitive advantage in the marketplace. This has probably never been more true. The technology teams are giving business an enormous competitive advantage, like the kinds of stuff that they are doing.

Gardner: How about that David Moses? Toot your horn a little bit. The applications that you and John are helping to develop and deploy, how impactful is this for Delta? How many of your airline tickets are now being purchased and the customer service elements being delivered through these apps? Is this sideline or is this much more main stream?

Mobile is the future. Everyone is going towards mobile devices and portable devices.

Moses: It's truly huge. I mean if you look at Delta.com, it's the main revenue driver for the entire company. So it's our face to the world, and streamlining that process where people are making it better and making the customer experience better is our number one goal. We want to really give our customers what they want and make it easy for them, because we have a wide range of customers.

We have pleasure customers who travel with their families once or may be twice a year, sometimes even less, and then we have people who travel with us every week. So we have two very different types of audiences and we have to cater to both. We have to make it fast and enjoyable and we have to allow them to dream a little bit and be inspired by where they want to go.

It's one of the biggest things that we have on our plate with mobile. Mobile is the future. Everyone is going towards mobile devices and portable devices. You're seeing more and more iPhones, iPads, and Android devices out there in the world, especially when you walk through the airport. We don't like that it happens, but sometimes things are out of our control like weather. And, we are always safe, so these things impact our schedule.

Our devices now will allow you to jump right online and rebook, and take care of yourself. We're actually going to do it for you first, and we are going to give you the option of keeping our suggestion, but if you want something different, you have got that choice. Its options and speed that really count, when the customers want to do something that impacts their lives. When they are trying to use the product, they can impact whether they get home to see their kids tonight or not. You need to give them options and you need to give them something really quick.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, as I listen, I also recall that one of the principles of the book you and Mark wrote was about being change ready, and I think you were talking about being change ready in terms of how you develop applications. With Delta, that change readiness comes at multiple levels. Not only do they have to innovate rapidly in their development, but their application themselves have to be change ready. That is to say, they need to be able to react to changing weather and very high scaling multiple variables involved with keeping all the people up-to-date.

Maybe you can help me get your impressions about how important change ready is and Delta is probably a poster child for that.

Core lifecycle

Hipps: I think that's right. In the book, when we talk about the core lifecycle, historically the SDLC -- we just call it the core lifecycle, so as not to get lost in alphabet soup. Within that we see traits among world-class organizations. There tend to be four traits that these world class organizations have mastered, and we list these traits as being change ready. They have a high degree of predictability, high degree of repeatability, and certainly their output is of high quality.

So those four: change readiness, predictability, repeatability and quality, tend to be abstracting some traits that we see across these great orgs. Those tend to be the key ones that really they are very effective at. David and John have talked about that we have got data points in each one of those, in some of the examples they have given.

A lot of this change readiness to a large degrees is formed by the point that we made in the beginning in the podcast, which is that fundamentally everything that business wants to do is going to have some applications or set of applications behind it. There is going to be a dependency there.

As Mark said, the business is only as nimble as its applications are. That puts applications teams in a position where they are not holding the business off at arms length, and saying, "No, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. No, that will take months." That rigidity may be historically where we came from, when we had fewer applications. They changed less. They were much bigger, more monolithic, and brittle. That is not the world we live in today.

Today, change is the expectation. David and John have been talking about this code being lead revenue generator and delta.com being the lead source of revenue on the Delta side. It's a great example. Clearly, anything the business wants to do to advance its market presence is going to come through that application.

You’ve got to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

The fact that they have leveraged automation and asset reuse and taken the time to build requirements traceability are all tick marks you put against organizations that have configured themselves to be change ready. That means they have stripped out as much latency as possible, the time it takes to do impact analysis.

They can see pretty quickly what all the dependencies are as a new change comes across. That’s just speaking of the assessment. There is, of course, the execution, which depends on automation, asset reuse, and all the things they talked about. We probably covered four of those, but certainly the change readiness does stand out.

Gardner: David Moses, the idea that more businesses are going to have to do what you have seems pretty clear. You're already well into updated web, very fast change transactional integrity, bringing in mobile devices, and it sounds as if you are well advised in terms of the ALM principles that the book discusses. For those organizations that are not quite there, that are still getting up to speed that are transitioning from legacy approaches and methods around development, what advice might you give them in terms of trying to get to where you already are?

Moses: This is my favorite topic too. First of all, you’ve got to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

Second, it’s about mindset and alignment to your goals. You have to have alignment to the customer. You still have to have department goals, but they should be aligned to what the customer needs.

Contradiction in goals

A lot of times, you see a contradiction in goals between the business group and an IT group. Delivering what the IT group wants to do may not exactly get what the business wants. And if the business was focused on the customer and the IT groups are focused on how many projects they can get out, but doesn’t really matter what projects they are, then there's an issue.

So, you have to really align very closely between business and IT, so much so that if you even have something that is a huge impact to your company, you may want to wrap a special forces team or integrity team around that, and have that group be one. Business and IT all in one group -- that way you completely eliminate the us-versus-them mentality. If you can’t do that, definitely make sure that you're aligned to the customer.

Gardner: John Bell, any further words of wisdom that you might want to share with folks who are making the transition from older legacy, development, deployment, and test practices to some of these newer principles?

Bell: One thing to add to that is that, at first, it can be a little scary moving things in, like moving all your requirements into one area and getting all the test cases and things and even looking at automation.

Sometimes, you have to take a half step back in order to take a full step forward. With us, even as we were moving things and centralizing it, there could be a little pain point in doing that, but that pain point will more than payoff in the long run. A lot of the people who are holding on to the old methodologies and ways of doing business, are thinking, "We're going to have to take a step back to do this."

You're going to get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Whatever step you take in that direction and whatever pain point you take as you move forward, once you start getting the automations in place, once you get these tools in place, you’ll see that you can start moving faster and faster that any initial pain point you took. You're going to exponentially get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Just look at the changing world that we live in. With delta.com now, we live here in Atlanta. If you go over to the airport, you realize that our business is not just flying customers within the United States in English. We now have kiosks in six different languages, and you meet people from all over the world that are now using our products and our websites in everything from simple Chinese to French.

It’s important that we realize the global nature of what we are doing, and that our methodology and our IT departments have to align ourselves, so that we can move this quickly. Without the automation and without the centralized tools and things we would never be able to put out as much work as we currently do.

Moses: If I can jump back in, there is one thing that John said that reminded me of something, as far as taking those steps. You need to take a step back to take two steps forward, when you are coming down to requirements -- another one of my favorite topics. I spent so much time trying to convince other managers in the organization, especially the BA manager to really input requirements in the Quality Center. I really wish I had Quality Center 11 at that time, because now it’s like a Word document to enter your requirements, which is what everybody wanted, right?

Back then, there was a lot of resistance to it, because there were forms and windows and things to fills out. So, it would have such an easier discussion. I hear that often too, whenever I am at HP Software Universe and people are talking about this. They say that there is such a resistance to certain things and certain teams incorporating their work, but now it’s so much easier that it’s almost a no-brainer.

As I said, I wish I had QC 11 back at the time I was fighting that battle, but thankfully we won, everybody saw the benefit of it, and we have been going forward ever since.

Requirements are important

There's another benefit, whenever you're talking about companies moving forward and innovating. I'd like to talk about requirements and not having your quality assurance people sitting in requirements meetings. To me, your quality assurance group really wants to know what the requirements will be, not what they may be. So, they're sitting in a meeting for a few weeks or months at a time to get requirements down, talking about what may be, when they could be testing.

You need to get things out to the customer. You can leverage your team like that. We do a ton of work with the small amount of people that’s comparable to other people in the industry, and that’s one of the main reasons we can do that.

Gardner: I guess we could sum that up as being focused on change ready not change waiting.

Moses: Exactly.

Bell: Absolutely.

Moses: Well, you have to have the right tools and you have to have enough knowledge in your group to be able to pull that off, and you have to have great documentation too.

Gardner: Thank you, David Moses. We're going to wrap it up there. We've been discussing how a shifting application’s landscape has provided a huge opening for improving how applications are built, consumed and managed by using new ALM methods and concepts. And we've seen how Delta Air Lines, in particular, has moved successfully to improve its applications quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from their efforts.

I'd like to thank our guests today. We've been joined by David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta. Thank you.

Moses: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And I should also add that he is in the eCommerce IT group there at Delta along with John Bell, who is a Senior Systems Engineer. Thank you, John.

Bell: Thanks for having us.

Gardner: We also have been joined by the authors of the book. That would be Mark Sarbiewski. He is Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Thanks, Mark.

Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solutions Marketing, HP Applications. Thanks, Brad.

Hipps: Thanks again.

Gardner: This is a second in a series of free podcast on ALM. We're examining a new book on the subject, The Applications Handbook: a Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle.

Our first podcast (read more about and access the first podcast) explored the actual need for the book and why organizations should rethink how they develop and deploy applications, and our final podcast will underscore the conclusions from the book, and explain how other organizations can now begin to change how they deliver and maintain applications that better serves a fast changing world.

We hope that you can join us for the rest of our series, and we also hope that you get a chance to get the book and examine it in more detail.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the first in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement.

We'll explore the current state of applications in large organizations, and how complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options, have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches.

In the book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors pursue the role and impact of automation and management over applications, as well as delving into the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

This is the first, in a series of three podcasts, on the ALM book, and we're here now with the authors to learn, first and foremost, why they wrote it, and to explore their major findings.

Please join me now in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Sarbiewski: Thank, you Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Hipps: Thanks, Dana

Gardner: I wonder if we could first begin by looking at why applications have been in trouble, what's going on, and why is there a huge opening now for improving how they have been built, consumed, and managed. Why don't we start with you, Mark?

A silver bullet

Sarbiewski: It's really a combination of factors, which is part of the challenge that customers have. They're looking for a silver bullet.

In most large enterprises, applications have been built up over many, many years. You throw acquisitions into that and you end up with layers of applications, in a lot of which there is redundancy. You have this wide mix of technology, huge amounts of legacy, all built different ways, and the business just wants response faster, faster, and faster.

So, we have old technologies hampering us. We have an old approach that we've built that technology on, and the modern world is dramatically different in a whole host of ways. We're changing our process. We're changing the way our teams are structured to be much more global teams, outsourced, nearshore, far shore, all of that stuff, and the technology is fundamentally shifting as well.

That's the context for why you see all these horror stories and these stats about the businesses' level of satisfaction with the responsiveness of IT, particularly in applications. If you think about it, that's what the business experience is.

They understand, have you automated this business process? Have you helped me take the website to a better place and give me a richer experience for my customers? It's the apps that the business experiences. When they see it move at glacial pace for all those reasons we just talked about, that's where IT organizations are looking to change the game.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, from your perspective, these have been problems that have been building for a long time. So why the book now?

Hipps: I'll speak from not only conversations with customers, but my own personal experience when I was running application delivery teams. A lot of these trends that we talk about -- outsourcing, service-based architectures, more flexible methodologies, whether it's iterative or agile -- you wouldn't necessary call any one of those brand new. Those things have been around for a few years now. Many enterprises we speak with and deal with have been leveraging them for a few years in some form or fashion.

If you're an owner of application teams or of a series of applications within an enterprise, these things tend to sneak in. By "these things" I mean these trends. They tend to sneak in on the perimeter, and you wake up one morning and realize all of a sudden that fundamentally the way your teams have long operated has been changed.

In some ways, it's death by a thousand cuts. No single one of these initiatives is going to force you to take a step back and say, hold the phone, let's figure out if the way we deliver applications now requires us to, in some significant way, rethink the mechanisms by which we conduct delivery.

From my own experience, it's difficult to get the time or the brain space to do that. Usually, you're neck deep in getting the next application out the door. You've got deadlines. You've got other applications or enhancements coming down the pike.

Necessary questions

You may not have the time to take a step back and say, "Wow, we're using these different methods" or "We're relying more on outsource teams, so we are not all colocated," or "We've got these new technologies we have begun delivering. What does that mean for performance and security of the application?" -- all the questions that those kinds of trends beg.

One of the objectives of this book was to do just that. Mark and I had the luxury to take a step back and think about what these trends mean soup to nuts for the way applications get stood up and delivered and how, from an enterprise perspective, we have responded or not responded to those new complexities.

Gardner: Mark Sarbiewski, in the book you guys deliver a really interesting comparison. You say the jet fighter cockpit was an example of where too many things happening at once overwhelm the pilot. So, rather than try to keep improving what the pilot was capable of, perhaps beyond what was natural, they redesigned a cockpit. How does that relate to what we are talking about here with ALM?

Sarbiewski: That’s a decent analogy for one of the critical design principles that we think is a way an enterprise should approach delivering and running applications. The idea is that you need both management and automation to achieve your end goals.

People have long thought of those things in very narrow ways. They've thought of management of a narrow domain space, like managing requirements and automating GUI functional tests. Those were all good steps forward, important things, but there was little connection between management across the lifecycle and automation across the lifecycle.

You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock.

The example of that jet fighter you can even extend to you driving a car. You're managing the car, managing how fast you go, and seeing the gauges. They're giving you information about the direction you're headed, if you have a nav system, how long it's going to take, all that. When you hit the gas, automation takes over. When you turn the wheel, it goes in a different direction.

Part of what we're trying to get at here is this interplay. You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock -- to create the situation where I see what's happening. I see across these very complex endeavors that I'm undertaking, many people, many teams, many stakeholders, lots of projects, lots of interdependencies, so I have that visibility. When we need to step on the gas and go in a particular direction, and speed everything up without blowing everything up, that's when I can rely on nicely integrated automation.

Gardner: Now, we are also seeing in the market a definition shift in applications. There's a new emphasis on services, agility, reuse, rapid iterations, and even ecosystems, where we're getting services and applications from a variety of sources.

This is different from what we could call super apps or the big honkin' packaged and integrated apps of the past. How is that shift impacting this, and how does that relate to your book? Let me start with you, Brad.

Hipps: We were talking earlier about these trends and complexities. You can speak about them at a headline level, but then you can take a particular example, like the one you're touching on. The nature of an application today is that it's not a monolith. It's not owned by a single project team or a program consisting of several teams.

Leveraging what we can

More often than not, it's something that has been assembled using a series of subcomponents, reusable services, or borrowed function points from other applications, etc. It's this thing that is, in the best sense, cobbled together. Rather than writing it all from scratch, we're leveraging what we can.

We can all agree that this makes sense, it’s the right way to do it, it's much more assembly line production versus handcrafting everything, which is certainly the direction we want to be headed in, from a software perspective.

But, that also presents us a lot of new challenges. How do I have visibility or discover the components that are out there, that are available for me to use? How do I trust that those components are reliable, that they are going to behave and perform in the way I want them to? Given the fact that I, as a given developer, didn't actually create it myself, how can I have faith in it? And, how are we going to authenticate all these different pieces?

It was one game of validation when, as I say, it was a monolith and all self-contained, and we executed our test from top to bottom, but now we have these individual subparts. We have to test each of them of themselves and then we have got make sure that connected they also do the same thing. A lot of them are GUI, so that presents its own complexity. How am I automating the test against something that has no GUI front-end, but I can record a playback?

I am speaking just at the the technical level. If you marry some of those tricks or hiccups against the reality of how that's going to be delivered, it's going to be delivered by multiple teams. Almost inevitably, those teams are not all going to be sharing one building. They're going to be located in different places.

It's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

So you've got these questions. How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How do we notify each other of defects? How am I aware when something is ready to retest? Relying on email is, let's just say, less than ideal. And, of course, we may be using different methods. Multiple teams could be using different methods. Those over there are working in agile fashion, we are working in waterfall fashion.

So the catchphrase we have, which may or may not make sense, it's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

Gardner: I suppose another change over the past 10 or 15 years has been the impact that these applications have on a business. In the past, they may have been great for building efficiency, approving productivity, maybe even just a nice to have, versus more manual ways of accomplishing business.

But nowadays, and I would like to borrow quote from the book, the business moves, changes, and expands only as fast and as efficiently as the applications do. So, applications are vastly more important now to a company. Mark, help me better understand why that's the case.

Sarbiewski: You'll see from a variety of industry folks that these eras of computing, when it was data processing, information management, or MIS, came through to the web, it's gone from "let's collate information and spin it around for the business" to "this is literally how we conduct nearly everything that we do."

Internal users

I'm talking internal users, whether it's working with their training systems, working with their expense systems, recording sales, tracking customers and prospects, just about everything goes into some software application.

Between companies and the supply chain is highly automated, all sorts of software, gluing partner and ecosystems together, and increasingly direct to the customer. We just take it for granted now that I actually don't ever really have to go to a bank anymore. I can just do everything I used to do in person now via their website, their web applications.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

I talk to our customers about the challenge. This is another thing that crept up on them. Just about every square inch of the enterprise is automated in some way by software. You always get a lot of nodding heads. What it has meant for IT teams is that you now have to understand every square inch of the business, and the businesses are incredibly dynamic. So, any part that changes almost drags along, or in some cases, is led by, and has to be led by, innovation in the software to make that happen.

I often tell customers that you are running significant large scale software or entities inside your business. You may not think of yourself that way, but a big business will have potentially thousands of apps. It will have software and potentially products that it builds. It will be orchestrating a whole huge mix of technologies, and inside and outside teams, which is more complex than what a lot of independent software vendors (ISVs) do. And my argument to them is that you need to make software a core competency if you are going to differentiate your business going forward.

So it's hugely important. There is example after example of innovations that businesses have created. One of my favorite ones to talk about is Bank of America's Keep the Change initiative. We had a little bit of insight into what that involved. That was an IT-led thing. The ability to use a debit card, have the leftover change rolled into a savings account, required massive software, updating new stuff to have it happened, and it has been hugely differentiating for that company.

Traditionally, in our legacy world, the push was always, can we get the application delivered?

Hipps: Mark, if I am not mistaken, there were tens of applications behind that one initiative, were there not?

Sarbiewski: Absolutely. Updates to existing ones, many tens of new ones, all had to come together on launch date. Think about that? IT is not reacting to "It would be nice if we could have this capability. It would make our lives easier." This was, "We are going to differentiate our business based on this. So, those 70 odd applications that you are building or modifying will have to be here on the launch date, because it's a business initiative."

Gardner: So, while we've had incredible increase in complexity, we have redefined these applications over a period of years. They have now taken on a much larger role within the company and yet, in many organizations, there is this legacy mechanism in place for how applications are treated. This perhaps is the disconnect

I'll throw that out to either of you. How bad is that? How much of a lag do we have here between what's required in organizations to do ALM properly, and what's the real run-of-the-mill way of doing it?

Hipps: The first company I worked with building applications probably had three of four major applications they worried about. One of the biggest ones, not surprisingly, was the billing and rating system that they had created. I think the first release of that system took us two years to get out the door. It was your classic custom-developed application. Many hands were on deck, cranking out code, running tests, and all the stuff you would expect.

Traditionally, in our legacy world, the push was always, can we get the application delivered? Can we get it stood up and working and out the door? And if we did that, we went to our ops brethren and we said, "Look guys, just don't kick the plug out. Just leave it alone, and we'll wait until we have another release sometime next year. We will have the next big push."

When we lived in that world -- and for many of us in apps who grew up in that world, not 40 years ago, but 15 years ago -- it's understandable that we've long taken this view that as long as we get the application built and stood-up, we've done what we need to do for the business.

A lot more planning

If we try to fix that legacy view against what we have been talking about today, which is effectively that the business can't twitch without requiring some change in a set of applications somewhere, we know that the reality of the world is that there is a heck of a lot more planning activity that goes on. We've got applications everywhere. They're going to be under constant review, modification, enhancement, addition, etc., and that's going to be a an endless stream.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing to meet whatever the latest, greatest idea is, and we have got to run them accordingly.

We have got to make sure that once they are out there and available, they are responsive. We have got to make sure that the teams that own them in the data centers are aware of their behaviors, and aware of which of those behaviors are configurable, without even coming back to the application teams.

The legacy view said, "Wow, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the end-all, be-all. If I get the SDLC right, if I get requirements and deployment done right, I win." We realize that this is still critical. What we would describe as the core lifecycle is still where it all begins.

But, this thing is going to live for 15 years. It's going to undergo endless amounts of change in that process. If I'm going to really be successful against what it is the business is after, I do have to account for this complete lifecycle. All the stuff that's happening before requirements, the portfolio investigation that's occurring, the architectural decisions I am making, have got to be true across the enterprise, as well of course as everything that happens once that thing goes live.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing.

How well connected I am with my operation peers? Have I shared the right information? Have I shared test scripts where possible? Am I linked into service desk? Am I aware of issues, as they are arising, ideally before the business is hearing about it? Those things are what we mean by getting your arms around the complete lifecycle is what's necessary, when you think about the modern delivery of applications.

Gardner: Let's drill into that a little bit, now that we understand that. That gap needs to be closed between what applications need to have in terms of support across your lifecycle and some of the traditional ways of doing that. And your suggestions in the beginning of the book are strong management and automation, but integrated.

Mark, what’s the need for integrating and what do you mean by integrating management and automation?

Sarbiewski: It goes back to that analogy of driving a car. You're doing both, and both things are happening in concert. I'm managing. I'm seeing the flow of information. I'm guiding this car, stepping on the gas, etc., and the engine and the suspension system is doing the heavy lifting of pushing me faster, or brakes are slowing me down, in a very automated way. I'm acting in a management capacity, on the management information I have. I'm relying on automation to make these types of things happen.

In the world of software delivery and obviously the operation phase, it's very similar. You have a whole series of things. For example, we'll start at the beginning, let's assume. We would argue that the beginning of an application is the idea, the request. I need to have X for the business.

Specific requirements

We judge whether or not this is of value against all other requests, and we decide we're going to do something. Now, I get into trying to understand the specific requirements. Even in the requirements, there is an aspect that can be a level of automation and a level of management.

Automation can come in when I am building a visualization, a quick prototype, and there are some great solutions that have emerged into the market to help a non-technical user create a representation of an application that has almost the perfect look and feel. We're not talking about generating code. We're talking about using HTML and tools to create the flow, the screen views, and the data input of what an application is going to look like.

You hear that a picture is worth a thousand words. This goes to one of the fundamental broken things that we have had forever about requirements. You and I have a discussion, and I write something down in text. This is a very poor articulation of what you really want and need, but if I can show you something, you can play around with it and give a look and feel to it and make comments on that -- very different.

Once we get to that look and feel of an app, at the push of a button, I can interpret all those business rules, all those rules about where was data, what was on the screen, was this data hidden, what was inputted, when did it flow to the next one, under what condition. All of that will get translated into a series of text-based requirements, test assets to test for that logic, and even the results and the rules and the data that needs to be input.

So, I have a process. I have had discussion and used some technology to visualize these requirements. At the push of a button, I automated the complete articulation, with perfect fidelity, including the positive test cases I want to run. I can manage those now, as I have always have, and my systems and teams expected to.

I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game.

Those requirements trigger test and defects and go against code, all of which can be linked. Whenever progress is made in any dimension against those requirements, I have created a test for one, I have run a test for one. I have run ten tests and eight paths. I have checked new coding against the bugs. All of that can be tied together and automated with workflow.

So, you start to see how I've got a creative series of information. I use automation to advance it to the next stage. I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game and how you deliver software, by doing just that, thinking about, what are the things that I have to manage and how does automation speed things up, and create outputs with greater fidelity and greater speed.

Hipps: In an ideal world, this idea of integrated management and automation is essentially a move away from the world we've had for a long time in software, which is, I have a series of individuated point tools that I use for particular siloed functions. As Mark said earlier, that was necessary, that was useful, and that was the critical step, but we shouldn't expect that or view that as the endgame.

The endgame should be that what I've got is a unified way of getting these various operations connected, so that my management picture has a straight flow through from the automated things that its kicked off. As those automated events occur, I'm getting a single, unified view of the results in my management view, which is, nine times out of ten, not the world we have when we look at big, big enterprise delivery. It is still a series of point tools, with maybe Excel laid over the top to try to unify it all.

Gardner: It sounds as if this is a natural maturation of IT, perhaps along the lines that we have seen with other aspects of business functions over the past 50 or even 100 years. Is that the case now? We are simply letting IT grow up, going beyond a dark art or a mysterious craft, to more of a regular recurring but dependable IT and/or business function?

Hipps: I think that's the case. It's funny, because for those of us who have been in software, grown up in software, there is always a temptation to hold ourselves as being on the cutting edge of everything and the sophisticated leaders of how work gets done.

Older and humbler

As I get older, I'm a little more humbled. If you want to understand the future of IT, you just need to look at where manufacturing has come. We've plagiarized the lion’s share of what we do in IT and the way we work a lot from what we have seen in manufacturing and mechanical engineering. That extends to lean methods. It starts probably all the way back to waterfall.

Maybe it's no surprise that when you ask us to talk about what you mean by integrated management and automation, we are borrowing an analogy from the world of mechanical engineering. We're talking about what planes can do, what ships can do, and what cars can do. So, I hope this is very much a natural advancement.

Sarbiewski: I talk about it to customers and I talk about the industrialization of IT. Sometimes, there's a little pushback on that, because it feels heavy. Then, I say, "Wait a minute. Think about how flexible Toyota or Boeing is." These companies have these very complex undertakings and yet can manage parts and supplies for providers and partners from every corner of the world, and every other car can be different coming off that assembly line. Look at how quickly they have shrunk their product lifecycles from design to a finished model.

Part of what's done that is exactly what Brad was talking about, an enormous investment in understanding the process and optimizing that, in supporting the various stakeholders, whether it's through design software, or automation on the factory line, all of that investment. We didn't do in IT. We built it ourselves. We used Excel and post-it notes and other things, and we created from scratch everything that we have done, because we can, because we made it easy to do that. We have made it easy to design and build it a thousand different ways.

There is this counterintuitive perception that because there is an infinite number of ways, we hold ourselves to be different than that. People are realizing that's not really the case. In fact, the more I can industrialize and keep it lean and agile, how I do this, the tools I use, if I give the people incredible tools to do it, and not just point tools but integrated, the results really speak for themselves.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process.

When we talk to customers that have done this, they achieve incredible results in three critical dimensions. There's a very longstanding joke that you can't go faster, you can't raise quality and take cost down. It's not just possible. This is this impenetrable triangle or it’s squeezing a balloon. We see with our customers that you absolutely can.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process. Guess what, they go faster, they take cost down, they drive quality up.

Gardner: I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've certainly piqued my interest in this book. We've been examining how the shifting applications landscape is providing a huge opportunity for improving how applications are built, consumed, and managed. You need to use these new ALM methods and concepts to get to that point, move beyond the old, because the gap is deep between what had been norm and what’s the new norm.

I want to thank our guests. We have been here with Mark Sarbiewski. He is the Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and also Brad Hipps, Product Marketing Manager for HP Applications. Thanks to you both.

Hipps: Thank you.

Sarbiewski: Thank you.

Gardner: This is the first in the series of three podcasts on ALM. We are examining a new book, The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, and it’s one that offers methods as well as means to overall business services delivery improvement.

Our next podcast examines how an enterprise, Delta Airlines, has moved successfully to improve its applications quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications. We will hear their story from two Delta IT executives and get the reactions to the new book's findings.

Our final podcast underscores the conclusions from the book and explains how other organizations can begin to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast changing world.

We hope you can join us for the rest of our series, and we hope you can get a chance to get the book and examine it in more detail.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the first in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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