IT Briefcase, U.S.: Cognizant’s Chief Technology Officer for Next-Gen Application Services Says Zero Maintenance IT is Operationally Efficient and Relevant to Business Objectives

“IT executives today expect they will need to provide more rigorous cost and ROI calculations to justify spending on services,” writes Srinivasan Thiagarajan. “At the same time, digital technology is increasingly the means for delivering profit-generating business services, so keeping technology in optimal working order is critical. This paradoxical imperative with the dual mandate of reducing cost and increasing value needs an effective strategy to drive toward ‘zero maintenance IT.’” Excerpts:

“Zero maintenance strategies drive delivery improvements and transform results by focusing on how IT organizations can more effectively manage non-discretionary and discretionary maintenance spend. Non-discretionary spend is primarily directed to incidents and service requests. If applications were fully functional, and didn’t fail or create issues, nondiscretionary spend could be eliminated.

Discretionary spend encompasses upgrades and enhancements to ensure applications and systems enable a business to meet its objectives. This spend can quickly grow because often what appears to be a simple change to enhance a service, has a ripple effect that touches many other applications and even infrastructure.

A zero maintenance IT strategy works to minimize both types of spend while also achieving a balance between cost and value. Understanding the different types of “debt” that accrue to maintenance spending, calculating their cost and minimizing those that deliver little value, are the cornerstones of the zero maintenance strategy:

- Technical debt. Compromised code quality or other technical problems create incidents that must be addressed.

- Functional debt. An application that has limited flexibility or features like self-service so users must create service requests.

- Knowledge debt: Missing or incomplete documentation and training results in a long turnaround time in responding to incidents and requests.

- Operational debt. A lack of process and tools means expensive manual intervention is required because an application does not fully automate a business process.

IT organizations accrue “interest” on these debts by increasing maintenance spend to ensure business continuity. The way to reduce this interest is to pay down the “principal,” i.e., the various debts. Debts can be addressed with automation, optimization, transformed business processes, etc.

The objective is to keep the technical and business value of an application synchronized. Apps that must deliver high business value deserve commensurate maintenance spend. Identifying these key apps requires understanding what business transactions an app contributes to or manages and tracing its impact throughout the IT portfolio and how long it takes for the transaction and related data to flow through the relevant business processes.

Making an application simpler, more local and rules-based can deliver business value, while also greatly reducing its maintenance debt. In addition, automating unavoidable activities significantly reduces costs and frees resources.

Running debt calculations routinely is important to get a clear view of debt causes, and to identify changes necessary to balance operational efficiencies with the business value delivered by the application portfolio.

Organizations willing to investigate their application maintenance debts and address them based on detailed cost-benefit analyses, will achieve a near zero-maintenance IT portfolio that is both operationally efficient as well as deeply relevant to the business and its objectives.”

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