Application management: What about hardware?

[guest]

Greetings,

I work for an organization whose engineering team not only develops new software applications but also purchases (from third parties), configures, installs, and maintains equipment such as mainframes and devices.

My question is, can such hardware also be considered a part of Application Management, or is that process only considered to be for software?

-thanks

[UrgentJensen]

Hi,

I'm not one hundred percent sure what you want to achieve in terms of using the ITIL model so two points on this:

Firstly, It depends on what you mean by 'Application Management'? Managing applications, as a service process, should fall under the implementation of Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration and Release Management. The actual management cycle of application/sofware development is separate and sits (most likely) along side Change and Release Management.

Secondly if I'm understanding you correctly but the hardware management would be linked to effective asset management.

Sorry to be a bit vague, tell us more!

UJ

[guest]

To be more specific, the engineering department of my company develops and deploys software applications, for use by its customers (air traffic controllers). After deployment, these applications are then "taken over" by the maintenance department, who operates and maintains them.

The thing is, the engineering department not only deploys software applications; sometimes entire pieces of equipment (hardware) are purchased by same engineering department, configured to customers' needs, and then deployed. So for example, one could have a flight data processing database that must be installed on an HP-UX cluster. Considerable engineering effort must be made to select the hardware, configure the middleware, and develop the software. Then, the entire "application" is handed over to the maintenance department for operation and maintenance, and used by the customer.

Hence my question about the semantics of the word "application" in ITIL. From what I've read -- and granted, I'm new to ITIL -- "application" seems to refer solely to software.

BTW in one of the itSMF books I purchased ("IT Service Management - An Introduction"), Application Management refers to the entire application life cycle. This includes app development as well as app deployment and support.

I hope this is a bit clearer?

-thanks