This artefact is a quick reference for transformation and modernizations tools. This artefact initially provides an overview of transformation and modernization and then later lists the benefits of these tools to the enterprise transformation and modernization journey. The later section of the document is the catalog of various tools that can be leveraged for enterprise modernization and transformation.

Introduction

 

Organization make significant investments to increase the value to the business applications. These applications continue to demonstrate value to the organization by supporting core processes and providing information that is crucial to the business operations. These applications contain millions of lines of code that is valuable business intelligence. They are at the center of the organization and process majority of the customer, product, services and other critical business data.

While these applications along with the information and functionality they contain— are invaluable to the business, they may be keeping the organization from realizing its true potential. In many cases, applications have been developed over many years and modified extensively, often by many different development teams. The evolution of these business applications may have resulted in a complex, highly integrated portfolio of inflexible applications and processes that could inhibit the ability to increase efficiency, differentiation and business agility. Faster time to market and improved agility can be difficult to achieve when one is burdened with large legacy applications that contain fragmented business processes and duplicate functionality and information. It’s even complex if the organization has gone through a merger or acquisition.

Leveraging existing systems, rather than replacing or rewriting them, is a time-tested approach to gaining a competitive advantage. Microservices and new technologies can help modernize, extend and reuse existing assets saving time and money while reducing risk. Once modernized, these IT systems offer greater agility, flexibility and robustness, and can boost productivity enabling organizations to quickly respond to complex market dynamics and changing business needs.

It’s important to also address the complex dimensions of architectural change. Fragmented business processes, workflows, data and tightly coupled application architectures can reduce organizations flexibility and ability to move to new technologies; they also hamper the ability to reuse existing assets. Additionally, a myriad of implementation technologies and middle­ware inhibit resource and application mobility. To transform the core systems into flexible applications and services—while avoid­ing costly and high-risk rip-and-replace solutions—you have the option of using a variety of approaches and techniques.

Transformation and Modernization Assessment Methodology

This section lists the different steps that needs to be performed for assessing the application landscape;

• Articulate and analyse the technology stack of the existing landscape. Thus, we understand if the frameworks or solutions leveraged are still relevant and supported by vendors. If the solution relies completely on outdated technologies, the chances are we would need to completely rewrite or replace it in the process of modernization.
• The next steps is to conduct an architecture audit. This will help define the system elements which are functioning well and focus on the ones that need modernization. Plus, you will be able to understand how different parts of the system interrelate, so that the future changes won’t affect the whole product.
• Legacy software usually has an excessive codebase, requiring regular reviews and refactoring. If not treated properly, the software tends to age. This might lead to more design flaws and conflicts as one tried to introduce new features or update some parts of the system. Hence, as a part of any modernization, one typically conducts a complete code review, assessing the quality and updateability of the system’s source code.
• Conduct a thorough design review to understand which parts of UI/UX interface needs refactoring/rearchitecting.
• Leverage Modernization and Transformation tools for migrating existing legacy applications to strategic solutions and frameworks.

Benefits of Transformation and Modernization Tools

The following lists the benefits of modernization and transformation tools and are vital part of the overall business digitization.

• Operating in an industry dominated by decade-old technology behemoths, you have a chance to outperform the competitors simply by offering a modern and strategic solution.
• User experience and design standards have evolved significantly over the last several years. By introducing modern, innovative UI and user-centric intuitive experiences, one can improve the customer processes and employee performance, thus, increasing the revenue.
• By replacing the legacy application with a modern solution, one can make sure the business is ready to evolve and expand, keeping up with technology advances.
• Leveraging the latest technology trends creates an internal culture of business agility and innovation in the organization.
• Outdated storage solutions prevent from accessing and making use of critical data. Database migration and optimization is required to successfully tap the big data opportunities.
• Legacy IT faults are one of the most common reasons for delays e.g. in air transportation industry, as well as in many others. Thus, systems modernization helps reduce the outage risks and cut the related losses.

Need for Tools

Digital transformation requires modernizing the technologies organization leverages in order to take advantage of the latest innovations. Achieving digital transformation can be challenging, especially for organizations that already have entrenched technologies and processes in place or that rely heavily on legacy software.

Enabling digital transformation, therefore, requires choosing digital transformation tools that make it possible to retain backwards compatibility with existing processes and software, while still achieving the innovation and efficiency that digital transformation aims to provide. This means rethinking and retooling your company to compete and succeed in an increasingly digital world.

Digital transformation has several aspects which involves customer experience, business processes and operating model transformation. In the digital economy one of the critical aspect is supplying your team with the right tools to be faster, more efficient, more agile, and more innovative.

While digital transformation is not only about technology and the right place to start may be transforming the company culture, but the right tools are key to the transformation journey. We have done extensive market research on the critical tools to support digital transformation and there is a wide range of tooling listed in the next section.

Transformation and Modernization Tools – Cheat Sheet

 

Summary

 

Organizations that continue to rely on inefficient and outdated legacy solutions are finding that their ongoing maintenance costs skyrocketing and the solutions not delivering value to the business. To stay competitive, organizations needs to transition legacy applications to new architectures and technologies while ensuring that they don’t incur substantial risk and high costs during rewrites or migra­tions. The tools and associated processes help:

• Unlock value by leveraging proven, time-tested solutions that can significantly lower risk, reduce costs and accelerate time to market.
• Lowers support costs by rationalizing the application components and information.
• Standardize technology stack, reducing integration com­plexity and resolving maintenance hot spots to enable a more agile application portfolio.
• Extend connectivity of core application assets and information across the enterprise by leveraging service orientation.

To derive benefits from digital capabilities, organizations have to cease relying on outdated software’s by transforming and modernizing their solutions stack leveraging tools that among other things facilitate migrations, provide & extend business capabilities, prioritize value aspirations and map out transformation journeys. This artefact is a consolidation of critical tools that are time-tested to drive key transformation and modernization initiatives.

About the Author

Sameer Paradkar is an Enterprise Architect with 15+ years of extensive experience in the ICT industry which spans across Consulting, Product Development and Systems Integration. He is an Open Group TOGAF, Oracle Master Java EA, TMForum NGOSS, IBM SOA Solutions, IBM Cloud Solutions, IBM MobileFirst, ITIL Foundation V3, COBIT 5 and AWS certified enterprise architect. He serves as an advisory architect on Enterprise Architecture programs and continues to work as a Subject Matter Expert. He has worked on multiple architecture transformation and modernization engagements in the USA, UK, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East Regions that presented a phased roadmap to transformation that maximized the business value, while minimizing costs and risks.

Sameer is part of Architecture Group in AtoS. Prior to AtoS he has worked in organizations like EY – IT Advisory, IBM GBS, Wiprom Consulting Services, TechMahindra and Infosys Technologies and specializes in IT Strategies and Enterprise transformation engagements.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and AtoS does not subscribe to the substance, veracity or truthfulness of the said opinion.

0