Grasp the application modernization momentum while you can

The pitfalls

There is still a huge gap between feeling the need and taking action. People typically expect high costs and a lot of complexity. A big bang that shakes the foundations of the organization is often not necessary. Instead of suddenly rewriting entire applications, you can work in stages. Convincing corporate stakeholders of the technical benefits of modernization is often a challenge. By providing them with new functionalities, modernization of the underlying systems can be done in parallel and step by step.

Another pitfall we frequently see is a lack of suitable in-house expertise. There is insufficient knowledge of modern technologies (available on the market), no idea of how to draw up a roadmap for strategic modernization, or people are simply too busy trying to keep things going. In addition to today’s operations, it is important to pay attention to innovation for tomorrow. If you can achieve a Positive Digital Flow, you no longer have to choose between 'operational IT' and 'strategic IT', between 'keep it running' and 'innovate'.

The benefits

Application modernization can reduce business complexity, cut maintenance time and costs, increase efficiency, improve compliance, and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO). The concrete effect will depend on the specific case. There's no need to aim for big results. An efficiency gain of 1% can easily generate hundreds of thousands of euros. An example is optimizing an application that shuts down a production environment for maintenance. Every second gained yields something.

Modernization also eliminates technical debt, because IT infrastructure and development artifacts (usually coding) created as a short-term solution to a business problem are replaced by a better overall solution. You can read more about how this works in our next blog post.