Operational excellent application management: A case study at an insurance company

Application management should contribute to IT effectiveness in the same way that IT should contribute to enterprise effectiveness. Shared service centers provide an environment to explicitly address application management. Scholars and practitioners however indicate mixed experiences of the application management function in organizations. This paper addresses process factors that relate to effective application management in a shared service environment; we define effectiveness in terms of operational excellence. We identify process factors on the one hand and operational excellence indicators on the other hand and relate them to one another in propositions. In a case study at an operational excellence focused shared service center of an insurance company we validate the completeness and correctness of our propositions. Our findings support the validity of the identified process factors and as such can be used to indicate directions for implementation of application management. We conclude with the identification for further research, specifically: to what extend does a shared service center moderate the relation between process factors on the one hand, and operational excellence on the other.