Definition of Business Application Life cycle stage status

[alihamzei]

Dear All, 

We are implementing APM for a company in the Netherland and I need some help in regards to Application Life cycle stage status definition. let me start elaborating my confusion and hope someone can help me. 

Life cycle Stage	Life cycle Stage Status	Definition (My interpretation)	Question
Operational	End of Support	Business Application still in-use however there is no support from the vendor or new feature.	1. What is the definition of the "End of support"?
Operational	Pending Retirement	Business Application is still in-use however there is a plan of the retirement in the pipeline.	1. pending retirement and obsolete can use interchangeably, What is the correct use case for each ? 2. What is the definition of "Pending retirement"?
End of Life	Obsolete	Business Application Reached its end of life however still few users are using it as a process dependent of this business application and successor business application hasn't yet developed/planned/unknown.	1. what is the definition of "obsolete"?
End of Life	Retired	Business Application has reached its end of life and retired.	1. what is the definition of "retired"?

[Graham Roy]

I think you will find there's no right or wrong answer to your question - in my (limited) experience we've pretty much defined what these mean to us, and have worked our process around our interpretation. On the whole I would agree with your definitions. 

To me, Pending Retirement means that it's still operational, but we know that it IS going. We use this as a means of validating that an application is "retirement ready", i.e. if we need to retain the app and/or data post-retirement, has this been planned, do we know what, how and when, etc. We added a "Planned Retirement Date" to the business app and we use this in our Retirement Readiness assessment. 

End of Life/Obsolete is an interesting one - here's how we use it. If we have an app that is retired (i.e. it's no longer being used for transaction processing) BUT we need to retain the app/data for audit, reporting (or maybe we have a legal hold order in place) then we mark this as EOL and Obsolete. If we don't need the data post-retirement it's EOL/Retired ... it's gone and we don't need it. By having those apps flagged as "Obsolete" we have an up-to-date inventory of what's still out there but not in operational use, across our app inventory we can assess technical debt, assess risk and we can use this as a vehicle to ensure that, if the data REALLY needs to be kept for some reason, we select an appropriate strategy to manage this, including information lifecycle management. In the past we often just left the "old" app in a state of limbo, still running in the background, sometimes for years and years, with the thought that someone, someday MIGHT need some data from it!!

[alihamzei]

Thanks Graham for sharing your thought and experience. The use cases you mentioned will help me during my talk with my customer to have an example of how these "stage status" can be use. 

[transformer]

To add what Graham shared, "End of Life" - "Obsolete" could be you have an application that is in "development" state but will no longer move to "Operation" or production state for wherever business reasons (no longer a priority or business changes or it was just a POC or demo app), that application can be considered as "Obsolete" or cancelled.

"Retired" is where business has decided that it no longer required this application in operational state for valid business rationalized decisions (consolidated of functions into another strategic app or no longer aligned to business capability or modernized into a completely new application etc). Also important here is that application marked as "Retired" must not have any CIs or infrastructure associated with it. In other words, it is truly decommissioned before it is flagged "Retired". 

Data retention comes up all the time in this context.  My view is that data retention is a business and architecture requirement.  App should still be considered as "Retired" but data can be retained and accessed depending on your use cases and choice of architecture.  

[mcastoe]

Graham is correct, you should define your processes and apply meaning where useful.  There is no need to use all if they do not make sense.

Some of the phases are quite meaningful such as Retired, you must set your business applications to Retired to remove them from license count as well as generally indicate the application is retired and no longer in use. 

Obsolete, has very little meaning for business application but perhaps your processes can make use.  Otherwise ignore it.  Graham has an interesting use for Obsolete. 

End of support is another that is better suited for Software but not a Business Application.  Remember, Business Applications are not a single Software title but multiple software, hardware and services working together to enable a result.  

Pending Retirement is another very useful concept for the Business Application as it implies retirement is underway. 

thanks,

mark