Where Should One Start with Digital Modernization?
In today’s digital economy, we see that consumers have become very savvy in using technology to enhance the quality of life. They recognize companies that value their time by optimizing the time spent through interactions. For example, sending check images to the bank via an image taken over the phone, gives back time to the customer. Most customers care about increased efficiency, how green is the business, how seamless is my experience when I walk into a store or go online, does loyalty mean anything, and are you really 24×7?
Most technologies that are in enterprise will age overtime; some will age more rapidly than others. In many cases, the outdated technologies are not capable in handling today’s needs. Outdated technologies are a liability to enterprises, the risk they pose is far greater than one can imagine. At times many business teams in organizations will have to augment that lack of capability with other complementing (or competing) applications. The challenge is that competing applications mean there is duplication of functionality, increased maintenance costs, and a high chance that you have a poor Return on Investments (ROI) and higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Every business goes through brand uplift every 7-10 years, as it is important for the business to be relevant with the current times. It is only so much a fresh coat of paint can do for the brand. Really, what is needed is, among other things, to uplift the applications used by the business and more importantly, the platform where current and future applications will be built on.
Research by Forrester found that almost 65% of businesses go around their IT to get IT services. Primarily, the root cause of this is that the applications/platforms become rigid and inflexible, making it difficult to extend or expand. With all these limitations and constraints, business takes an easy way out by approaching other vendors for solutions and services. These solutions and services grow over time and the support turns over to IT, which becomes a nightmare.
It is important to select a partner who can perform a portfolio analysis of your applications and the platforms it runs on to give you a diagnostic report on the current state of your applications/platform. This will help determine if the applications/platforms are positioned to meet the current and future needs of your business.
Many of them can also help you in preparing a roadmap against the aging applications/platform. This roadmap will provide an in-depth view on what needs to be done immediately, in 6 months, in 12 months and so on. We will also help categorize the applications/platforms, on whether it is strategic, emerging, legacy or obsolete.
Businesses need to support multiple channels, where their customers could use their services. The expectation of the customer is to transact over any of the channels that is convenient for them. This point of interaction could be on any of the channels, at any time, or anywhere. The expectation is that the experience needs to be seamless to the customer.
So, are the platform and applications positioned to meet this need? There are several ways to solve this gap that is building. Some of the strategies that exist today come from the legacy modernization world, when you migrated your CoBOL program to a newer technology, namely – Lift and Shift, Rip and Replace, or Leave and Leverage. While these focused on the applications, the platforms that were put into place today are aging and cannot keep up with the changing needs of the business.
The need of the hour is to modernize the platform where the application sits. The “Application” model is waning and the need is more to move to an “Apps” model. Customers and employees don’t want to deal with clunky and clumsy applications. They want to use applications that are in tune with the time. Meaning, if you have to go to the bank and deposit a check via a teller, in today’s digital economy, it is not something which is acceptable.
Here are a couple of products and platform modernization services, which a company like Ness SES can provide:
- Portfolio Rationalization of the platforms, technologies and applications that are used in your enterprise
- Roadmap of modernization across that business where it involves several platforms by varying degree of tenure
- Modernize the experience of the applications; make it current with the times as you uplift the brand
- Modernize the integration between the applications and the platform; make way to newer integration methods that will enable you to open it
- Modernize your platform to enable omni-channel capabilities
- Modernization can help you monetize data by providing the data within your ecosystem
- Modernize your platform to be more of a ‘Lego’ model; it will help your strategy of swapping out one component/product with another on your platform
- Modernize the technology stack that is aligned to maximize integration with open architectures from existing closed architectures
At Ness SES, we have a long history of building and modernizing products and platforms. We have helped several ISVs in the past 14 years to build their products and platforms. Our product engineering focus enables us to modernize platforms, in a manner that positions the current and future applications to be extended and expanded to meet growing needs. We bring in agile engineering disciplines, such as continuous integration, test driven development; that help in ensuring a quality product gets delivered on time, on budget and compressed version releases. We see that platform modernization needs to be coupled with creating delightful user experiences. We bring consumer grade experiences to enterprise applications. The consumer experiences also change rapidly and we bring higher grade experiences into consumer applications that are driven by consumer electronics, consumer lifestyles and generation needs.
