How to Use Automated, Agile Processes for Application Modernization
Automation and agility are the keys to successful application modernization. Find out more.
Application modernization is a strategic priority for organizations today. The C-suite wants to gain modern capabilities by rehosting, rebuilding, refactoring, and replacing applications. But how can that be assured? Miten Marfatia, CEO of EvolveWare, shines the spotlight on automation and agility as key pieces of the application modernization puzzle.
Nearly half of IT leaders (45 percent) say the applications they are modernizing are critical to their organization’s success. Given the fast pace of digital transformation, organizations must accelerate application modernization initiatives. Despite this imperative, IT teams are bedeviled by multiple challenges. These challenges include navigating IT talent shortages, particularly for legacy systems, updating applications created in various programming languages, and selecting multiple options for modernization. In addition, teams have had to freeze code and keep business policies static during the time it takes to modernize each application.
Business stakeholders are often reluctant to embark on application modernization because these initiatives are so costly, time-consuming, and prone to failure. On average, organizations spend $1.5 million modernizing each application, yet software developers and architects say at least one of their projects has failed. Not only do failed projects represent lost time and investment, but they can also harm the business’s appetite to undertake more initiatives, costing momentum in the marketplace.
IT team members understand the scope of the challenge. That’s why 62 percent of developers and architects say that having the right resources and tools is essential to ensure the success of these initiatives.
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Agile Processes Increase Application Modernization Gains
It’s time to take a different approach. With agile processes and automation, IT teams can gain greater clarity into what needs to be modernized, streamline critical updates, and create a culture of continuous modernization. They can accomplish these goals while reducing cost, risk, and negative impact on business.
Agile processes and capabilities embedded in next-generation platforms transform the most challenging aspects of application modernization. The benefits include the following:
1. Trading manual work for agile documentation processes: IT teams require a foundational understanding of applications for modernization initiatives to be successful. However, most do not have a detailed, up-to-date set of documentation artifacts for their legacy applications, including logic, complexity, dependencies and more. Obtaining this information (traditionally done manually) can be extremely difficult, as applications are written in multiple programming languages and thousands if not millions of lines of code are typically involved.
State-of-the-art application modernization platforms speed up these processes by automating documentation generation and enabling that documentation to be updated whenever changes are made. Teams are also able to maintain visibility into these changes. As a result, organizations always possess up-to-date insights on the applications they’re transforming.
2. Analyzing code in an intelligent manner: Ideally, organizations should analyze code before migrating it to a modern language or platform. This includes identifying and deactivating dead or unwanted code, consolidating logic to integrate disjointed processes, and reducing redundancies, among other goals. And they’d prefer to develop these insights at scale rather than working through the code line by line to find issues.
Teams can leverage modern modernization platforms to automate the reverse engineering of application code and use the extracted metadata to identify application dependencies and areas for optimization. By determining which lines of code need to be optimized before they are migrated, they can ensure that the new application will meet business and performance requirements.
3. Ending the era of code freezes for business rules extraction and code optimization: IT teams have typically frozen business policies as they update applications. Or, if they need to update policies, IT teams have unfrozen code to implement them, but then they risk losing visibility into the work that’s been performed.
With an ideal application modernization platform, IT teams can seamlessly update policies on applications they’re currently modernizing without needing to freeze code. This applies to both business rules extraction initiatives as well as code optimization and migration initiatives during the optimization phase. That means businesses can continue to make the changes they need to respond to new market dynamics while IT innovates at pace.
4. Choosing a phased approach instead of big-bang implementations: Application modernization has historically been executed as big-bang initiatives. This approach has increased the potential for errors, causing initiatives to go out of scope and increasing business disruption.
With the ability to understand critical dependencies while planning and to make continuous business policy updates while executing, IT teams can take a different approach. They can use truly agile processes to modernize applications incrementally over time, aligning new capabilities with critical business requirements. This approach aligns with Gartner ® recommendation in its 2022 report, Use Continuous Modernization to Optimize Legacy Applications1, to “implement continuous modernization by identifying, prioritizing and removing the most severe friction points – business capabilities with poor application support.”
5. Trading small projects for large, complex initiatives: IT teams have often modernized smaller applications without significant dependencies to reduce the risk of creating data silos, destabilizing applications, or going significantly over-schedule or over-budget.
With the right set of data, CIOs and their teams can more accurately understand dependencies and plan modernization initiatives. And the ability to incorporate continuous updates throughout the business rules extraction or code optimization processes enables modernizing multiple, large applications at a time, such as those that support a core business process – or even transforming an entire portfolio of applications simultaneously. As with individual applications, teams would modernize a portfolio in phases. They would break up the modernization of individual applications based on the structure of applications and their needs, test new functionality, and roll out new capabilities, repeating this process until each application achieved its target state.
Agile Processes and Platforms to Speed Up Modernization
The ability to trade manual, disjointed processes for agile, automated workflows is a huge boon to organizations seeking to accelerate progress on modernization initiatives. Agile processes and automation strip cost, waste, and risk from these strategic initiatives, while empowering the business with new capabilities in a shorter time frame.
If you’ve ever thought there was a better way to modernize applications, you’re right. Adopting agile processes can help you create more business value from your IT investments and develop a culture of continuous innovation, starting today.
How are you injecting automation and agility into your processes to drive modernization? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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