MIS Asia: Cognizant’s Assistant Vice President of Global Managed Services Says a “Zero Maintenance” Approach can Help Sustain and Enhance the Business and Technical Value of Application Portfolio

“Application maintenance is one of the most critical services delivered by IT service delivery organizations,” writes Srinivasan Thiagarajan. “Among the many operational challenges corpora­tions continually face is the question of how much time and money they should allocate to applica­tion maintenance. It is imperative for organizations to free up their IT maintenance budgets to allocate funds to fuel business growth.” Excerpts:

“Businesses need to look beyond the traditional practices of IT cost optimization. The application portfolio needs to be modular and componentized to handle any changing business requirements. The infrastructure should be optimized to meet the “right” demand. And finally, IT should be able to deliver value and make an impact on business performance and not merely focus on IT service level agreements (SLAs).

“Zero maintenance” is a philosophy that underpins application maintenance models and helps reduce the cost of maintaining applications by eliminating effort as well as work. It is not sufficient to eliminate the effort required to maintain applications, but to invest in increasing resiliency and building the functionality needed for business growth to improve the “technical value” and “business value” of the portfolio.

Zero maintenance aims to progressively improve the IT portfolio maturity to a “fail-proof” state by reducing non-discretionary spend, optimizing discretionary spend, and delivering business outcomes.

In a typical client context, these three components of zero maintenance will need to be applied in the right proportion in order to deliver on the client’s short-term and long-term goals. Organizations battling with legacy platforms would want to control their op-ex as a top priority and may want to focus on controlling their non-discretionary spend. Mature organizations would up their ante towards business outcomes as most of their non-discretionary and discretionary spend are in the right proportion. Alternatively, organizations looking to go digital may have to focus on all the three―cap-ex, op-ex and business outcomes.

The zero maintenance approach sustains and enhances the business as well as technical value of application portfolio, positively impacting cap-ex, op-ex and business performance.”

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