Across industries, IT budgets for “run the business” initiatives have declined steadily over the past few years. Yet despite having fewer dollars to spend on activities such as application maintenance and extensions, many senior leaders still expect IT to deliver outcomes that meet if not exceed their strategic business objectives. 

To deliver on these expectations, IT must initiate a more rigorous review of the ROI measurement process and consider embracing a managed services-based approach to managing their portfolios. This approach, in our experience, can simultaneously reduce costs and increase the value delivered to business. 

We believe organizations should adopt a “zero maintenance strategy,” based on the following imperatives: 

• Reduce non-discretionary spend by eliminating the effort expended to run applications in production while optimizing infrastructure costs by “rightsizing” application needs. 

• Optimize discretionary spend by accelerating time-to-market while, at the same time, ensuring that the technical and functional value of the application portfolio is increased. 

• Deliver business outcomes that continuously verify the relevance of installed applications and ensure they are not only “fit for use” but also “fit for purpose.”  

Organizations should manage this value continuum using the “debt framework,” in which various costs that are present in the portfolio are measured and controlled, ensuring the balance between business need and portfolio stability (see Figure 1 for more detail). 

Interactive    

Figure 1

To learn more about how to cap application maintenance costs without impacting business value, read our white paper The Future of IT: A Zero Maintenance Strategy or visit the application maintenance section of our website.