Most business people understand the strategic value of differentiated business processes. Yet the importance of ALM in supporting those processes gets much less attention. In reality, any organization that creates custom software should take the ALM process as seriously as it does any other critical business process. ALM might be even more important, since it creates the underpinnings for the others.

In many organizations, how well a firms execute its business processes is directly tied to how well it is implementing its application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy. This analyst white paper reviews ALM and how it supports business processes, and specifically, a firm's software development cycle (SDLC).