The Evolution of Application Management Services – Harnessing the Full Value - Stefanini

The Evolution Of Application Management Services – Harnessing The Full Value

Application Management Services (AMS) used to be primarily concerned with ‘keeping the lights on’. Businesses would look to an AMS provider to ensure things didn’t break, or that issues were tackled quickly once they arose.

Increasingly, however, businesses are looking for a more sophisticated offering from their AMS providers. Now, AMS is expected to act less as a reactive way to troubleshoot problems and more as a proactive way to gain a strategic view of the future, while ensuring a company’s use of applications is delivering maximum value on an ongoing basis.

We caught up with Florin Stefan, Applications Development Director at Stefanini EMEA, to discuss the changing AMS paradigm, what is driving the shift and how businesses can realize the full value of next-gen AMS.


New expectations of IT

In many ways, the new role of AMS is just an extension of the general shift in what’s expected of IT suppliers, with greater focus on delivering value over simply reducing costs.

“IT teams were once mostly tasked with improving operational efficiency and reducing costs. That now feels outdated – discussions are focused on driving value, which could mean identifying new revenue streams, or identifying a smarter way of operating in the future,” explains Florin.

This has led to a next-gen application management framework, in which AMS has a role to play in providing business agility by creating a positive environment for business opportunities.

This also shifts AMS away from simply delivering against KPIs and SLAs toward being measured on the end-user experience. Under this framework, it’s not enough that an application is merely functioning, AMS providers must instead ensure the entire workforce also has a good experience – and can work at their maximum productivity – when using it.


The next-gen application framework

The fact that AMS is increasingly focused on end-user experience doesn’t mean that a cost element isn’t also a key component of a next-gen AMS framework.

Within this framework, AMS still reduces operational costs, while also enabling businesses to invest in additional priorities. This ‘doing more with less’ component is complemented by a ‘maximizing value’ component. This involves supporting businesses with churn reduction and increasing customer lifetime value for external customers, while improving IT proficiency for internal users.

At Stefanini, this has involved coupling our software factory with other centers of excellence, including design thinking, cybersecurity, digital marketing, product management, and analytics and AI.

A next-gen AMS offer is really comprehensive and a way to generate maximum value,” says Florin.

Ultimately, the most successful AMS partnerships include the very latest AMS approach, combined with long-term deep-level partnerships.

“AMS comes into its own when there is deep collaboration, which is why Stefanini’s co-creation ethos is so important to our offer. More than 40% of our AMS engagements were initiated more than 10 years ago, and are continuously evolving. With a sophisticated approach underpinning a deep partnership, AMS extends far beyond a reactive service to become a proactive and strategic way to maximize business value,” concludes Florin. 

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