AUTHOR: Anthony Nelson

Applications designed in the past may be holding your organization back from embracing the future. Modernizing and migrating those applications to take advantage of the digital revolution can unlock hidden value and empower future growth, but getting the most out of application modernization involves following some critical best practices.

The applications on which your business depends have become too inefficient to ignore any more, and it’s time to modernize them. But is the process you’re going to use to bring those applications into the modern era even older and more inefficient than the software you’re going to be upgrading?

Too many organizations see their digital strategies run aground on legacy, standalone applications that create entirely new challenges when asked to operate in a digital environment. These applications usually play a critical organizational role, but without effective integration and modernization they can become critical failure points for a digital strategy.

We’ve all had to deal with software applications that are reminders of an older, simpler time. They’re usually deeply-embedded applications that meet very specific and complex needs. You’ve almost certainly dealt with these before; the tools with user interfaces dating to a different era that persist long past their sell-by date because they do the job just fine and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix[…]

Is digital transformation forcing application transformation? One way to answer this question is to ask another in return: How well can your organization keep pace with industry-wide or even culture-wide digital transformation if the applications you depend on remain stubbornly unchanged?