The Gartner report contains 5 Alternative Ideas for Applications Management. Learn how to proactively reduce Application support & maintenance cost and impact business performance. With the continual media focus on Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud Services, IT executives can be forgiven for forgetting that a high percentage of existing IT spends remains locked in the management of the existing IT stage. If current approaches to managing IT are not transformed, they will continue to remain locked. The only successful strategy deployed by many organization is the squeeze their IT services providers for incremental discounts. A recent Gartner report stated that "on average in 2012, 35% of IT spending was on applications, 55% was on infrastructure and the remaining 10% was on IT management, finance and administration activities. 50% of an application's cost across its lifecycle is support and maintenance. IT leaders are faced with a paradox of shrinking budgets but a business imperative to grow. Given that fewer than 20% of organizations have an application services strategy, ASM suddenly becomes a big budgetary blind spot HCL has created a radical new approach. It has combines various industry-leading best practices, including LEAN process Management Principles with focused automation and unstained knowledge reuse for the support and maintenance of applications while creating incremental value for business every day with guaranteed cost reductions: Alternate Applications Support and Maintenance or ALT ASM. In summary ALT ASM seeks to: 1) understand the cause of ‘work’ in Application Support 2) Stop the ‘work’ arising in the first instance 3) Manage the ‘work’ more effectively when it has arisen ALT ASM engagements are substantially forward-looking. They continuously monitor applications to identify functional and technical re-engineering requirements. Dynamic business demand for enhanced functionality of legacy applications is met through staffing flexibility. Reduced It complexity is attained by identify redundant applications for decommissioning. The application portfolio is kept lean and total cost of ownership (TCO) is kept low. More importantly, ALT ASM includes the monitoring of both IT key performance indicators and business process KPIs. Using business process and application visibility tools and process watch dashboards, ALT ASM is able to align IT systems to business processes. ALT ASM propagates alternative thinking of proactively reducing incidents and putting business process first.