Guide to Enterprise Application Transformation
Applications are the backbone of many businesses today. They provide the functionality that allows employees to do their jobs, customers to interact with your organization, and systems to manage data. This is why it’s so essential for companies to ensure their legacy applications are up-to-date and operate effectively.
Application transformation is the process of modernizing outdated applications to better meet user expectations and demand. It aims to improve business efficiency and competitiveness by reducing costs and increasing productivity. Enterprise application transformation focuses on updating a wide range of business applications. This includes both internal and third-party applications, and private or public cloud solutions.
Why is application transformation so significant? It unlocks a company’s potential to deliver value more quickly and efficiently than ever before. As technology demands increase dramatically — due to globalization, mobility, and data generation — companies need an agile approach that allows for swift reaction.
Enterprises must transform their applications to stay competitive, retain users, and appeal to new user segments. In addition, companies that invest in enterprise application transformation reap the benefits of a more efficient workforce, better customer service, and more engaged employees.
Framing Application Transformation for the Enterprise
As demand for digital products and experiences increased because of the pandemic, many organizations were forced to undergo application transformations. However, a reactive application transformation is not an efficient or long-term solution for ascertaining that an app meets modern standards.
Enterprise application transformation is a massive undertaking. It necessitates a long-term, sustainable application transformation strategy that assures products are constantly improving rather than becoming obsolete.
A significant challenge in enterprise application transformation is ensuring that the proper infrastructure and business process support a modernized application. If not, the benefits of an improved user experience may be short-lived.
App modernization is a highly complex project that requires a thorough understanding of the organization’s needs in order to keep costs, timelines, and impacts to a minimum. Before making any changes, you must first map out all of the project’s dependencies, data flows, and business rules to ensure that you fully comprehend the project’s scope.
The first step in any change effort like this is to identify which parts of the app are critical for transformation so that you can focus your efforts there while ensuring the rest of the app remains stable. It’s also a good idea to know the difference between what’s necessary for transformation and what’s nice to have.
Enterprise application transformation is a global trend that will continue to evolve in the coming years. As businesses look to transform, they must consider how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help them optimize products and provide new features beyond the current market’s scope.
In addition, businesses must also adapt to widely implemented technologies such as cloud and big data solutions to remain competitive.
Three Keys to Modernizing Legacy Systems
Modernizing legacy systems is more than just a buzzword; it’s a real-life problem that enterprises face every day. In many cases, legacy systems are not easily visible to the outside world, but they can present themselves as issues in either product development or internal operations. These problems are often difficult to solve without changing business models or creating new organization structures.
Modernizing legacy systems starts at the top—before you undergo the process, you have to create a culture that supports innovation and change. A top-down innovation culture helps teams iterate quickly on their product and enables them to listen to user feedback while continuously enhancing the UX. This approach helps DevOps teams keep up with the ever-changing market landscape.
With the rise of mobile devices and cloud computing, users expect more from their software than ever before: they want to access it from anywhere on whatever device they’re using at any given moment (and this expectation is increasing). Enterprises also want a single view across multiple platforms and devices to see what’s happening with their data wherever they are.
Here are the essentials steps to take when getting ready for a legacy system modernization:
1. Identify which apps are high risk or high value to prioritize transformation.
Identify which apps are high risk or high value to prioritize transformation. High risk means threatening the experience of the end-users, resulting in attrition (for example, poor performance or usability). High value means that the application is critical to the business and its success. For example, known pain points in the core app that affect end users, admins, or executives could be a good place to prioritize, as consistent issues are likely to push users away.
Determine who will be in charge of the application transformation and who will be responsible for it. For each application, someone should be in charge of managing the transformation process from start to finish. If that person isn’t already on your team, hire a development partner who specializes in enterprise application transformation services and has worked on large-scale migrations, acquisitions, and integrations projects.
2. Prepare appropriate and adequate development resources.
Successful enterprise application transformation requires careful planning, careful execution, and a commitment to ongoing maintenance. Whatever the size of your organization, you should expect to invest significant time and effort into this project.
You’ll need to prepare appropriate and adequate development resources to get started. Even if you’re not planning to build new applications from scratch, you’ll need a strong development team to help you modernize existing systems and bring them up-to-date with modern technology patterns and practices.
While app transformation should be incorporated into regular delivery cycles, it’s also critical to ensure that the app is maintained and supported in its current state to avoid user disruption. For example, suppose an app currently supports a specific business process with a high volume of transactions. In that case, this process should be migrated first — before any other efforts are made on the application.
Partnering with a development partner specializing in application transformation services can help enterprises manage the risk involved in these large projects by offering expertise in project management, architecture, agile development, and testing.
3. Make informed technology decisions.
As stated before, application transformation is a complex process that requires multiple steps. The first step is to evaluate the current state of the application and determine if the product needs to move to new systems. If so, changes must be assessed in terms of the larger tech stack and how each change will impact the larger tech ecosystem.
Here are some questions you should ask:
- What technology stacks do we currently use? What are our plans for future adoption?
- What can be re-used from legacy systems? Conversely, what needs to be replaced?
- Does this project require new infrastructure or just software upgrades?
- How will we address security concerns with legacy systems?
When choosing a development partner, look for application transformation services providers with experience helping enterprises through large-scale modernization projects. Your provider should have expertise in your unique technology stack and should be able to demonstrate tangible success stories of working with similar companies in your industry. Consider partnering with a company that has partnerships with major cloud providers to ensure you have access to all the best tools and platforms.
Start Your Digital Transformation with KMS Technology
When looking at enterprise application transformation options, it’s important to start with a clear vision of your business needs. From there, your journey should take you in an arc towards modern infrastructure and applications optimized for flexibility and speedy release cycles. With this approach in mind, your enterprise application transformation will be successful and sustainable in the long run.
Enterprise application transformation is a journey. It’s a journey that starts with a strategic business vision and ends with a transformed enterprise application landscape. Therefore, enterprise application transformation must be treated as a total business undertaking. Making the business case for enterprise application transformation is essential to get the buy-in you need from everyone affected.
There are many approaches and factors to consider when getting this buy-in, so don’t downplay the importance of working with a consulting firm that has experience in enterprise application transformation.
Enterprise application modernization projects can improve performance, change how applications are maintained, and redirect budget dollars from support to innovation.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your business goals and enterprise application transformation needs.
