University ITSM

ITIL v3's "Service Operation" text describes several Service Operation functions: the Service Desk, Technical Management, IT Operations Management, and Application Management. So what is "application management"?

Application management is a function that takes care of applications through the entire application life cycle. "Function" here means a group of people and the tools that group uses. Application management is not a process: it is a function. Application management understands the application: why it was chosen, how it was built, and how it functions.

"Service Operation" takes pains to describe how "application management" is different from "application development," and even spends a couple of pages on potential application management methodologies. I think of the difference as: application development takes requirements, builds code (line by line), tests code, and in general creates new things. Application management helps gather requirements, understands the technical tool as delivered, helps coordinate builds, and takes what application development built and manages it in production.

In our environment, we have two terms that I think fit into ITIL's application management:

• Application operator: people who have full access through the front-end of an application, e.g. a Blackboard site administrator who can create users, courses, and configure Blackboard through the web.
• Application administrator: people who install and upgrade an application on the underlying system. They have access to configure the application, read system logs, and in general do anything with the application. These people are different than system administrators because they are not responsible for the underlying box, but they definitely must work close together e.g. to let the system administrator know when an upgrade might require extra disk space.