What’s an Application Manager to think?

Natalie is an Application Manager for a large Midwestern manufacturer. Her responsibilities include both the development of new functionality for her system (the enterprise Customer Relationship Management system) as well as its ongoing operations. One day she is called into a meeting, at which a senior ITIL consultant is discussing Service Management.

Gary: “… The thing you folks need to do is get out of a technology centered approach to interacting with the business. The business doesn’t care about things like ‘Applications’!”

Natalie: “Excuse me, why do you say that?”

Gary: “Well, it’s clear. The business doesn’t know what an application is. You shouldn’t even talk about it with them. What they need is a Service!”

Natalie: “I’m not providing a service?”

Gary: “Not if you are calling yourself an Application Manager. All that Application Managers do is build technical stuff.”

Natalie: “Hmm. I just got out of a meeting with the senior VP for marketing. We were talking about my application’s availability level. We even used the term SLA. But this term ‘Service’ you’re throwing around, we don’t talk in quite the same way.”

Gary: “That’s because you are too technical in your approach. See, you need to get out of the bits and bytes and talk in business terms!”

Natalie: “… Like discussing the business objectives of the next major release with the SVP? How the application (excuse me, service) is going to help improve customer retention and sales force productivity?”

Gary: “Right… Say, I thought you said you were just an application manager.”

Natalie: “I did… Oh, never mind…”