The Five Elements of Successful Application Modernization

Aug 09, 2022 | min read

Daniel Viveiros

In today’s dynamic and competitive markets, change that is merely evolutionary may not be fast enough. Here’s how to accelerate the application side of digital transformations with maximum speed and minimal disruption.

Many organizations operate on technology platforms that date back, at least in part, years, or even decades. The reasons why are obvious: making sweeping changes to newer languages, operating models, or infrastructure platforms can be difficult, risky, and expensive.

As a result, organizations may find themselves hamstrung by outdated operating systems or applications that are no longer supported; rapidly aging data centers; and custom solutions that once worked well but now represent nothing but technical debt. Working in such environments, not to mention trying to connect them to today’s newest environments, can be stressful, time-consuming, and operations intensive.

Sitting still on decrepit legacy architectures is simply not an option in global marketplaces that are moving at breakneck speed and rapidly embracing cloud-based software solutions.

That’s where application modernization comes in.

Application modernization means much more than just updating your legacy CRM solution to the latest version. Simply put, an application modernization strategy means deploying the tools, skills, and methodologies you need to reimagine, update, or migrate your business solutions and gain the ability to innovate competitively. Once your modernized applications are up and running, you have new operational models and new business capabilities that will point you toward success. A true ecosystem transformation leads to a more agile enterprise that can reduce its time to market and cut costs without sacrificing stability. You may make mistakes along the way, but they will be far faster and easier to clean up than they would be on sclerotic legacy systems.

Innovation Keeps You Competitive

Old and closed technology architectures slow down your ability to keep experiences fresh and your users and/or customers happy, giving your competitors an opening. It’s crucial to strive for continuous delivery and resilience, both of which have a direct impact on business performance by increasing agility and speed. You need only think of the earthshaking impact of the Covid-19 pandemic to understand just how fast businesses had to react to persevere.

At the same time, well-run businesses that meet their customers online via apps have been setting an extremely high bar for responsiveness and flexibility, sometimes updating their systems several times a day in ways that keep their customers engaged and delighted. It’s a fundamental change of mindset: today’s customers and app users expect and like change. To them, an automatic OS update that offers new and exciting features is a benefit, not a glitch. To what extent do you need to revamp your internal processes to be that fresh and agile?

The Inevitability of Change

Of course, with digital transformation top of mind in many C suites, the call for change may come even if you’ve tried to avoid it. That’s why it’s best to be thinking about application modernization proactively before sudden demand forces the organization towards shortcuts and suboptimal migrations.

Regulation may also force a change. Dated legacy architectures are often vulnerable to cyberattacks that can not only bring a business to a halt and hurt your reputation but can also endanger customer data, a huge potential liability. Because monolithic and highly coupled architectures create a substantial risk of security breaches, some of them may fail to comply with increasingly stringent data security and privacy compliance requirements or new regulations. Once again, some kind of change will be unavoidable.

The Tools and Technologies Are Here to Move Forward

You already know that modern cloud-native architectures build and deploy software in ways that increase digital delivery agility, reduce IT backlog, and allow for quicker reaction to customer feedback, all of which are critical components of a successful business’s toolset. The question is how to undertake that modernization without incurring technical and cultural complications and significant costs.

How can you:

• Go from idea to launch, regardless of the size of the digital initiative, at a much faster pace?
• Gain scalability, elasticity, cost efficiencies, resiliency, and security?
• Avoid the time-consuming impact of testing that slows down innovation?
•. Get past the cultural fears surrounding potentially costly and complex technology-based business decisions?

The Five Steps to Getting Application Modernization Right

1. Make Sure Your Modernization Addresses Your Business Objectives
Application modernization is not just a technology initiative; it’s a business issue as well. It’s essential to align your application modernization business case to your business objectives by asking what mix of speed, customer experience and response, security, and scalability you need to thrive going forward. Start with the business need, and work backward into the technology solutions.

You should seek out your own unique methodology to identify, quantify, and measure business impact throughout your entire modernization, including the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure your success. It’s also necessary to evaluate your current technology state and digital capabilities. Once you know your baseline, you can start to develop a workable timeline of steps toward total modernization.

As you plan, remember that you must make a case for technology solutions that lead directly to unlocking new revenue streams and contribute to top-line growth, and soon. No CEO will want to hear about an 8- to 12-month migration plan for a single application without a compelling business case attached to it.

2. Look to the Cloud
There’s no longer any doubt: Leveraging a modern cloud platform as the foundation for your modernization efforts is imperative if you hope to gain a competitive advantage. Scalability, availability, global distribution, security standards, and ready-to-use managed services are essential to any modern architecture, and the right cloud-based solution for you, usually easily provisioned from a hyperscale cloud provider, will provide them all in a cost-effective way. To achieve success, you’ll have to define your migration plan and address every technical decision regarding cloud adoption: security, network, hybrid cloud setup, and more. Then you can think about the best target architectures for the applications you plan to modernize.

3. Adopt a Product Mindset
You can avoid the considerable risk of disruption and uncertainty during your application modernization program by focusing on continuous modernization, customer centricity, outcome orientation, and built-in analytics: the foundations of any successful digital implementation. Embrace a process that implements waves of migration and incremental updates of legacy systems into efficient microservices. Open up to your customers and users as you prototype and validate. Their feedback can help inspire innovative ideas and drive a smoother implementation.

4. Create New Operating Models
Very often, monolithic legacy applications are maintained with legacy software development practices and processes that are increasingly inefficient and unsustainable. The good news is that continuous delivery, telemetry, error budget, post-mortem analysis, and many other techniques will lead to a new level of reliability. Revise your operating models and deploy new tools, practices, and cultures to operate applications in your new cloud-native environment:

Decoupled architecture—a software architecture practice where services, components, and layers perform and execute tasks independently from each other, allowing specialization, flexibility, and fewer risks to the ecosystem.
DevOps—practices to shorten the application development lifecycle, providing continuous delivery of high-quality software.
DevSecOps—moving security considerations “to the left” in software development so that it is integral to the process and a built-in capability of applications.
Test automation—testing the software code and functionalities with a high level of automation and minimal human involvement, and ensuring a minimal risk of impacting other applications when adding in or working on any one application.

All these models help you avoid waiting to release new functionality or digital experiences just because other projects that prohibit controlled testing of each feature are still in the works.

5. Inspire People, Recruit Better, and Change the Culture
Change can be tough, but your application modernization program will require new skills, processes, and attitudes. Ensuring proper change management, closing knowledge gaps, and providing assurances for your teams are all essential to succeeding with your new digital capabilities. IT workers certainly won’t be motivated to help with a digital modernization initiative if they believe that the result may be unemployment. You must look for ways to create excitement, rather than fear, around the initiative.

It's also clear that when it comes to technology recruitment, you’ll be far more successful in finding eager and motivated candidates if you’re offering them a chance to work at the cutting edge rather than spend their time on unexciting and potentially obsolete legacy systems that will do nothing to position them for success in the future.

Innovation Keeps You Competitive

Although a complete application modernization initiative across a large organization may be a multi-million-dollar, multi-year effort that ultimately touches every part of the business, you shouldn’t feel daunted or afraid to start addressing your most pressing business issues. A well-considered proactive application modernization program implemented over time will deliver the speed, flexibility, and frictionless operations you need to succeed. Your competitors may already know this. Now you do, too.

Daniel Viveiros

Chief Technology Officer, CI&T