5 Things to Include in Your Application Modernization Strategy

In the movie Moneyball, Billy Beane (played masterfully by Brad Pitt), the general manager of the Oakland A’s, realizes the conventional way of building a roster no longer gives him an advantage. Out of sheer frustration, he reinvents his team by using unorthodox methods and new approaches to build a championship caliber squad.

And in so many ways, your business is just like Beane’s Oakland A’s. It’s indescribably frustrating when you realize your current systems and applications are just not capable of performing in a way that allows you to have an advantage.

There are a multitude of reasons why there may be bottlenecks within those legacy systems, such as outdated software languages, high maintenance costs, and unsupported components.

So, how does a company transform and update their legacy systems to ensure they are perceived as modern by current and new customers, all while preserving your current revenue streams? The answer is executing a pragmatic modernization strategy.

What is application modernization strategy?

An application modernization strategy is best described as the process of transforming your monolithic legacy applications to newer languages, frameworks, and infrastructure platforms.

As we progress in this digital age, your software needs to be able to grow to embrace new coding concepts, user experiences, and access mechanisms needed to meet the ever growing demands and rising expectations of the marketplace.  Today, small businesses, mid-market companies, and enterprises alike expect software that is robust, scalable, secure, and accessible from any device at any time. In fact they expect you to deliver a Platform, not just a product. An effective application modernization strategy doesn’t just make your applications faster and more reliable. It enables you to decrease costs and increase innovation by not simply modernizing your products, but by transforming your product portfolio into a true PLATFORM.  You likely already have all the IP you need to make this happen, and by embracing a pragmatic, platform-centric modernization strategy, you can actually accelerate your modernization effort, re-use large portions of your existing code and products, and still dramatically reduce the number of resources that are required to maintain your offerings.

In fact, an AltexSoft white paper reports that enterprises spend 80% of their IT budget managing and maintaining legacy systems.  Driving towards a low-maintenance future is key to an effective, pragmatic modernization strategy.  Not doing so would be tragic.

This all serves to better enhance the end-users’ experience and raise your customers’ satisfaction levels. To ensure your business is getting it right, and optimizing your efforts for this transformation, here are 5 things to include in your modernization strategy:

5 things to include in executing a pragmatic application modernization strategy

1. Set Clear Objectives

Modernizing your applications can be a long journey with many different work streams. Setting clear, sequential objectives will ensure your teams’ focus is on the right items, in the right sequence during what can otherwise be a tedious process. Objective clarity allows organizations to complete their long-term modernization goals by directing the company’s resources and activities to the correct milestones.  Objectives also establish standards of performance. They allow you to measure the effectiveness of your effort regularly  and take corrective action if needed to keep the overall effort on-track and on-pace.

2. Analyze Resources

Ensuring the right people are taking on the right tasks is mission-critical when planning a modernization roadmap. Appointing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for each application will allow your team to divide and conquer. These SMEs are imperative for the future as well by allowing other team members, and especially new employees, to lean on these resources when learning the new or legacy systems.

It’s important to analyze the skillsets of your technical team members. By doing this, you’re ensuring they are assigned to the most appropriate and fitting application work stream. Ultimately, this will foster a support system that will allow for quicker growth.  Remember that though everyone on your team may be a “Full Stack Developer,” each resource will be naturally and substantially more effective and productive in one area than others (e.g. front-end vs back-end development, or database- vs UX design).

3. Assess Different Approaches

Like any major change, there are different ways a business can approach this transformation. Different strategies will suit different companies better than others. Noting the strengths and weaknesses for each modernization approach will allow your leadership to pick the correct strategy for your team (we have a three-part series diving more deeply into various modernization approaches here). Here are some common approaches:

• Rip and Replace. This option completely replaces an original legacy system with a brand-new software application that is better suited for the company moving forward. Learn more about this approach in a previous blog we wrote here.
• Rehost/Replatform. This approach is simply moving your system to another architecture (which usually is a cloud server) to improve scalability and maintainability.  You can read about this approach here.
• Incremental Approach: The best of both worlds! Start by freshening up your leacy user interfaces, then extend your current systems via the cloud, and top it all off by offering modern experiences for your customers. Learn about this approach here.

4. Measure Improvements

Measuring your improvements during this transformation is key in understanding just exactly where you stand during your application modernization journey. Similar to setting initial objectives, consistent measurements help define and measure progress. Setting objectives and key results (OKRs) enable your team to set clear, data driven objectives in which your business can measure (and hopefully monetize!) Having this data will allow you to pivot or make any necessary changes to work streams where resource or knowledge gaps may have arisen.

5. Stabilize Leadership

Modernization efforts can often be large, lengthy, scary, and expensive affairs.  It’s essential to have organizational stability to implement an effective modernization strategy–at the executive level and within R&D itself.  You want everyone–your customers, partners, and employees–to feel that there is a “steady hand on the tiller.”   Develop a systematic approach to the major organizational changes that inevitably come with application modernization.  Ultimately, mature technical leadership will ensure your business goals are not compromised throughout the process, but instead remain the main priority.

Modernizing Your Application

While these five things are not the only ones to keep in mind during an application modernization journey, they will certainly help steer your team towards achieving success during this major process.

For more information on modernizing your application, check out our three-step guide on how to make modernization a reality for your organization.