Driving Your Business Forward with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Business and technology executives including CTOs, CIOs and IT managers are being asked to do more with less. Maintenance of legacy systems and current technology support consumes vast amounts (Forrester research1 suggests as much as 67%) of a typical enterprise 2software budget. This leaves precious few resources to develop new standards based, adaptive applications that meet the core needs of the business. Managing complexity, aligning IT with the business, and enabling agility are top priorities for CIOs who are under pressure to do more for the business with fixed or diminishing budgets. So how can you measure the real value of IT and how can you ensure that it helps you effectively run your business? Your core business and your IT departments must coalesce and your software initiatives must deliver measurable business benefits. To help achieve this, a common lifecycle management solution is needed to help you track, balance, and communicate the systems that are being created to effectively run your business. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) provides such a solution by addressing the overall alignment and synchronization of business goals and IT investment priorities. It relies on automation, integration and a coordinated approach to optimize the software development process. Acquiring tools to support ALM, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is straightforward. Introducing and driving an ALM strategy within your organization, and understanding the necessary changes required within your business is more difficult. This whitepaper introduces ALM, the business benefits that you can achieve with an ALM strategy, and it explains how you can get started. The tangible business benefits you can realize with ALM include:
1 Source: “The State of Application Development in Enterprises and SMBs”, Forrester Research, February 2007. 2 Enterprise in this context refers to a company of 1,000 or more employees.
Increased return-on-investment from your IT initiatives.
Increased accountability.
Improved compliance with regulations.
Quicker time to market.

These benefits help you to more effectively utilize IT to drive your business forward and achieve its stated goals.

Supported Operating Systems

Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows XP

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