How to See Beyond Application Modernization Blind Spots
Overcome application modernization blind spots for a seamless transformation.
In the ever-evolving business landscape, application modernization is a necessity. Miten Marfatia of EvolveWare explores how to navigate common blind spots and ensure a successful transformation.
In today’s evolving, post-pandemic business landscape, modernizing legacy applications and system infrastructure is viewed by executive management as a means to improve business efficiency and customer experience. To the IT department, transformation to modern, agile technologies will result in fewer critical system failures and increased employee productivity.
More critically, it resolves the mounting problem of a shrinking talent pool that supports legacy applications. For the security department, this initiative reduces potential vulnerabilities and technical debt that cyber-criminals thrive on to access intellectual property and data illegally. Hence, a failure to modernize can take a heavy toll on revenue, profits, and reputation.
While the need to modernize applications only increases in urgency, the application modernization journey is often full of unexpected obstacles and blind spots.
We’ll share below some of these blind spots, the obstacles that result from them, and our suggestions on how to overcome them.
See More: 3 Modernization Secrets of the Fortune 1000
Knowledge of Your Existing Systems or Lack Thereof
In a recent independent survey report on the State of Modernization, 41% of the 200+ IT leaders polled were highly confident that they had sufficient knowledge of their applications to begin the modernization process. However, once the process was initiated, only 28% remained confident. IT leaders frequently underestimate the required knowledge of their systems to identify and plan the processes that will result in a successful modernization effort. This leads to costly delays and failures. Even when firms recognize the importance of understanding the current state of their applications, poll respondents believed that their support personnel could address these needs. This was despite admitting that many of their personnel had retired and faced significant difficulties finding and retaining replacement talent.
Extracting up-to-date, detailed documentation that gives your entire IT team a foundational understanding of your legacy applications’ logic, complexity, and dependencies is critical to successfully modernizing them. This documentation will also help you ensure you do not carry technical debt and potential security vulnerabilities to the transformed application.
The obstacle to extracting such documentation? When done manually, it is an arduous, time-consuming, and error-prone process, especially when millions of lines of code in multiple different programming languages are involved. The task gets even more complex when the languages are legacy languages only an aging, retiring workforce can decipher and analyze.
81% of the IT leaders polled agreed that hiring or retaining legacy programmers is a challenge. While 36% of respondents felt that additional hiring or outsourcing could solve this problem, industry experts like Deloitte point out that organizations relying on legacy technology will face increased staffing challenges as this talent pool shrinks.
Hence, the most efficient and reliable solution is to use an automation platform that extracts meta-data from the existing applications and generates documentation that performs a deep dive into the code complexity, dependencies, and logic. Automated platforms that provide extensive details of the source applications and support multiple languages are ideal as they mitigate the risk of manual errors, failures due to lack of information, and having to search for expensive personnel with varied expertise.
See More: Achieving Good Data and Database Modernization
Use of a “Big-bang” Approach With the Promise of Quick Results
The risks associated with biting off more than you can chew aren’t so much a ‘blind spot’ as it is a clear and present danger. Time and time again, we’ve seen organizations attempt to modernize applications without adequate preparations or defined and tested processes that can be implemented in a phased manner.
This “big bang” approach to modernization has substantial risks. Critically, it does not allow intermediate deliverables to be evaluated to determine whether the end goals can be achieved. This can leave organizations blindsided when issues that may have been recognized early on with intermediate results get identified only during the testing of final deliverables.
A phased approach that breaks the project into smaller, more manageable steps with intermediate deliverables can help keep everything on track. By establishing well-defined and repeatable processes that can be used throughout the modernization lifecycle, IT leaders can create success points with associated budgets that will place the entire project on a pathway to success.
An example of a tried-and-true modernization roadmap can be phased as below:
- Agree on the business goals of a modernization initiative, keeping organizational constraints in mind.
- Assess and document legacy applications, including critical dependencies.
- Determine or validate the best path to modernization for each application. The most common approaches are replacing, rebuilding, or refactoring. Replacing and rebuilding requires extracting business rules; refactoring requires optimizing the source and converting it to modern target code.
- Create a small, clearly defined project (pilot project) to test each path to modernization. This includes defining the processes for each path with intermediate deliverables that can be evaluated for success.
- Regroup with key stakeholders after the completion of the pilot project and conduct revisions of processes and expectations based on the items revealed during implementation. It’s important to start small and document your finalized processes before you scale.
Implementing a Code Freeze or Failing to Synchronize Modernization with Application Updates
Large modernization projects take several months or multiple years to complete. During this period, it is inconceivable for organizations not to change business policies in response to economic conditions or legislative changes. Hence, for such projects, organizations must continue changing the applications in production to maintain functional equivalence with their modernized versions.
However, suppose organizations continue to update the applications. In that case, they risk losing sight of these changes in their modernized workflows, resulting in the new applications needing to be functionally equivalent to those in production.
State-of-the-art modernization platforms offer a straightforward solution to this problem. In addition to automating documentation generation, these platforms enable continuous updates of that documentation by processing code changes. This allows the modernization teams to monitor these changes and their effect on the work performed.
The Timing of Planning and Budgeting for Application Modernization
Application modernization is no longer an option; it is a must. Today, specialized legacy programmers are rare and expensive, and soon enough, they will not be available. Additionally, security gaps and vulnerabilities in outdated legacy systems will only become more pronounced, leading to catastrophic operational failures. Using legacy systems will prevent innovation, reduce productivity, and increase costs. Over time, businesses that put off application modernization will wind up spending more for less, leading to reputational damage and, eventually, a loss of market share. Familiarizing yourself with strategies to avoid blind spots, obstacles, and common mistakes associated with application modernization projects will help ensure a seamless and more secure transformation journey.
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What steps have you followed to overcome common application modernization blind spots? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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