IT Sideways, Malaysia: Cognizant’s Assistant Vice President of Global Managed Services Says a “Zero Maintenance” Approach Holds Competitive Advantage

“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,” writes Srinivasan Thiagarajan. “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.” Excerpts:

“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.

Reducing non-discretionary spend is about eliminating activities that are not absolutely necessary and automating those that are. This is done by eliminating the effort for delivering a service (by reducing the incidents) and optimizing the infrastructure by reclaiming unused or underused infrastructure.

Optimizing discretionary spend focuses on lowering the cost of enhancing the applications to make them stay relevant and reducing the time-to-market for new functionalities. The framework measures technical value of the application portfolio and has interventions to make them ‘fit for use’, significantly reducing the waste induced by multiple factors such as complexity, heterogeneity and quality.

Delivering business outcomes is to counter-balance the overt focus on cost. The application that is ‘fit for use’ needs to be ‘fit for purpose’ as well. A framework to baseline and enhance the business value becomes imperative to delivering the desired business results. A two-way drill-down (top-down and bottom-up) approach will ensure that the applications deliver what the business needs.

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. With structured tools and frameworks in place, this journey can be accurately measured and tracked for any stated objective and turned into competitive advantage.”

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