The life cycle of information technology is becoming shorter every year. New competitors are disrupting industries by leveraging state-of-the-moment digital practices and processes. Customer expectations are constantly evolving at an accelerating pace for the most advanced, hyperconnected, seamless experiences. IT functions are under pressure to support leading-edge capabilities such as data analytics, cybersecurity, automated processing, and integration with third-party systems. Legacy systems, old-school operation structures, and processes suppress agility and speed.

As a result, today's enterprises continuously face economic disruptions. Besides that, there is a need to catch up with competition and rivalry from emerging companies. They should balance their efforts and resources with achieving business imperatives. Usually, this process requires a large amount of work in separate initiatives and projects.

There are few value-generation stoppers that could be visible from a helicopter view:

• First is legacy systems, whose quality metrics improvements were ignored during the last couple of quarters.
  
• The second stopper is engineering environments "focused on short-term value".
  
  

These factors lead to an interest that should be paid on the debt that has been accumulated due to hasty technical decisions. They slow companies down, consume huge parts of the budget and suppress any opportunities to innovate with new technology.

From our observations, this is caused by the lack of technology committees in company boards and "tech-aware" senior management. Another aspect is the massive disconnect between C-level and engineering teams. According to the global research from Advanced, it is the main barrier to modernization efforts.

At TageSpot, since the early beginning, we've been trying to build an engineering culture that ensures a solid connection to business goals, objectives, and motivation.

In a zoo of custom & vendor legacy systems of low quality, fragile infrastructure, unsuccessful spikes of new custom software and complex integrations with other enterprise systems it could be incredibly difficult to choose a modernization strategy and make the first step.

Gartner shares 7 modernization options that should be considered as a baseline. Usually, they fit in most of the cases encountered by the companies.

Every application & infrastructure component should be matched to a particular category. After that, priorities should be set and a roadmap planned.

Modernization strategies could be employed to facilitate problem framing and decision-making. Architecture-driven modernization, WMU, Renaissance, or SABA. Some of them are attempts to standardize the modernization approach. Another help to choose the maintenance approach and adapt it according to customer satisfaction level. There are strategies that evaluate modernization from different angles like business and technical. They could also provide hints on how to deal with people's issues. Other models facilitate mapping intersections between software quality and business impact or streamline the modernization process by applying reverse engineering practices.

At TageSpot we will help you to choose the best fit for modernization strategy considering your particular use case.

If you need help in your modernization journey, our team at TageSpot will be more than willing to help, by sharing our similar experiences and expertise with you. Feel free to contact us. We will help you to become more efficient and implement all business targets faster whether it is improved customer experience or time to market for a product change.