Bernard Golden

Five Rules for Today's ALM

- Bernard Golden

With all of today’s buzz about containers, cloud computing, and how developers are the new kingmaker, one might be forgiven for thinking that ALM is passe. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the elements of ALM -end-to-end tracking of applications from requirements to deployment, with supporting tooling and integrated tracking and reporting -- are more relevant today than ever before.

However, it is true that the environment in which ALM operates is vastly different today than a decade ago. The pace of change in today’s business environment is visibly faster than ten years ago, and the role of IT is significantly more important which means ALM must evolve to meet today’s requirements.

Here are five rules for today’s ALM:

Applications are the business

Ten years ago, IT was primarily concerned with automating internal processes - inventory, payroll, HR, and so on. And when IT looked outward, its systems were primarily informative. For example,websites and document display. Since IT carried an inward focus, the speed of its application process was not critical to the operation of the overall company. Moreover, because infrastructure took so long to provision, any application lifecycle inefficiencies were typically masked by the provisioning process.

However, neither of these two factors are still relevant today. Computing infrastructure is no longer a weeks-long or months-long process. The rise of cloud computing makes infrastructure available in mere minutes. This exposes application development, deployment and management as the “long pole” constraining IT performance.