Technology modernization as a crucial element of every enterprise

Why the need arises?

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, it requires a large amount of work in separate initiatives and projects.

"Sixty-nine percent of boards of directors say that the effects of the pandemic crisis, the economic crisis and the social crisis are accelerating digital business initiatives"

Source: Gartner

Digital change is hard for most enterprises

"Enterprises are envious of small companies and startups. They are able to adapt more quickly and experiment in shorter cycles. This helps them to achieve desired value proposition in the timeframes dictated by the market." - TageSpot Technology Excellence Center opinion.

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. Those things 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. That is why in 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.

Modernization types

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.

In the end, it is worth mentioning a very important rule - don't start modernization of every component in parallel. Usually, it ends up with severe consequences. Start little by little, validate results frequently and show value from the initiative to stakeholders on regular basis. Expansion of modernization initiatives to several streams shouldn't be done until most of the team members and stakeholders start to feel confidence in themself and overall strategy.

If you need help in your modernization journey, we in TageSpot will be more than willing to help, by sharing our similar experiences and expertise with you. Feel free to contact us.