As you might have noticed, there is an area on the SDN Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) landing page dedicated to the business value and justification of application life-cycle management. This area goes beyond the function and feature discussion by providing content and case studies demonstrating how companies have realized business value using ALM.
The common factor underlying the content in this area is the quest to build the business case for ALM. This justification is sorely needed by many of our customers – we have heard this loud and clear over the past few months. Even if you are totally convinced of SAP’s ALM approach (and we hope that you are), you probably still have to convince your management or internal (business) sponsors for approval to invest in ALM – for example, for the initial set-up and configuration of the SAP Solution Manager or to purchase and implement SAP Solution Extensions which integrate easily with the SAP Solution Manager.
"
There are certain initial steps required to reap the value of the various ALM processes encompassed by the SAP Solution Manager or by SAP Solution Extensions. Each supported ALM process contributes to the overall ROI. The more extensively ALM processes are supported, the shorter the payback period is.
Two examples of benefits from ALM are reduced costs and accelerated innovation. DuPont reduced annual operations costs by over US$11 million via central monitoring of systems and processes. Hindustan Unilever sped up Software Change Management by 70% (see Success Stories).
But, of course, there is no single answer to the question “What is the business case for ALM?”. ALM approaches and roadmaps will differ from company to company. But what we would like to do is to initiate a series of discussions about customer experiences of creating value by executing on their ALM roadmap. There is already a great launch of the discussion, initiated by SAP Mentor The ALM journey at Australia Post..
In the coming weeks, we would like to fuel this discussion with more customer examples, analyst reports (e.g. SAP Solution Manager ROI report) and value calculation dashboards to show quantifiable calculations for the various ALM processes you can employ and adapt for your own needs.
Do you think that this “business value/justification” topic is a good fit with the technically oriented community that populates SDN?
Looking forward to your feedback and experiences generating business value with Application Life-Cycle Management!
- SAP Managed Tags:
