Application Management is about designing, building, implementing, monitoring and controlling software applications and the overall application landscape.
The Dragon1 software for you as a business professional is perfectly fit for managing your Application Portfolio. This is because any landscape or portfolio can be modeled, visualized, designed, analyzed, monitored and managed.
Application Portfolio Management
An Application Landscape is the coherent set of applications of an organization. Often the goal of Application Portfolio Management is to reduce the costs and lower complexity of the applications in order to keep the application landscape agile and fit for use for the business (processes), also named Application Performance Management (APM).
Managing the Application Portfolio.
Application Rationalization
Rationalization is about rethinking which applications are really needed and for what tasks, and which are not. And doing this may lead to a lot fewer applications actually being needed. And that can save a lot of time, money and resources.
Dragon1 supports you visually in the rationalization of your applications, like deduplicating. Just generate large-size overviews of the IT environment. Many organizations have four or five versions of the same software. One goal is then to reduce the number of different versions of the same software in your organization to one.
Components and Elements
Every organization today needs an EA repository (EA stands for Enterprise Architecture) for their applications. An excel sheet just won't do today anymore. In this EA repository, you need to administer data of your software applications at three levels of abstraction: conceptual, logical, physical and implementational level.
Examples of application elements to administer are modules, functions, services, business rules and interfaces.
Examples of application components are: dlls, source code, operating systems, scripts, documents and manuals.
Application Architectures.
Administering these kinds of elements and components, will enable you to have an overview of dependencies regarding your application management. So you can execute small and big changes more easily.
Dragon1 supports you in creating such an EA repository. You have the freedom to administer anything you want. But you also choose to work with a schema that enforces you to work with a certain type of elements and components.
Concepts and Principles
It is not only important to know the structure and dependencies of your software applications at a logical and physical and implementational level. In relation to your enterprise strategy, it is more than important to know the conceptual level and the application principles.
Examples of application concepts are loosely coupling, data hiding, data integration and application virtualization. Being able to implement these kinds of concepts at a mature level will ensure you will gain the benefits these concepts as said to bring.
By administering the elements and components implemented in the organization that is part of these concepts, and projecting that onto a pattern, one can see which important elements and components are missing for the concept to really work and produce beneficiary results.
Administering principles or rules are also very important. Here we provide some example principles or rules that will make you understand it is important to administer these.
- Use Services
- Virtualize Application Services
- Control Service Access by User Policy
- Use Privileged Data Services
- Move to the cloud
- Make it all mobile with regards to the user interface
- Use Separation of Concerns
- Use Event Processing
- Use In-Memory Data Grids and DBMS
Patterns and Anti Patterns of Applications
In the previous paragraph we mentioned you would want to project implemented elements onto patterns. But to be able to that you need to be able to administer patterns.
A pattern, or design pattern, is a concept or generic solution for a commonly occurring problem, that can be (re)used or applied repetitively, and has a typical set or structured elements
Typical application patterns are Observer, client/server, model-view-controller, Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
Dragon1 supports the analysis and management of your applications using user-defined patterns, building blocks and principles.
Anti-patterns, of course, are patterns you want to get rid of. Example of anti-patterns are spaghetti code, tightly coupled interfaces, no responsive design, rich client applications.
Screenshot shows the Observer Design Pattern.
The observer pattern is a software design pattern in which an object, called the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes, usually by calling one of their methods.