Enterprise CIO/business stakeholders are always challenged to modernize their legacy systems to add new functionality as per the demands of business and for regulatory authorities. Making these changes on systems which are several years old becomes a complex and time-consuming process and accommodating several such changes will be an expensive proposition to maintain in the years to come.
With the demand of moving applications to Cloud and leverage modern development toolsets to quickly modernize, it is worthwhile for organisations to revisit their application modernization strategy. It is important to have a strategy and approach for taking these digital initiatives to ensure quick build and deployment.
Start by looking at the Key Personas using the current system. The User Personas are based on roles they perform on the current system like creating records, updating information, providing approvals, tracking tasks to be fulfilled, creating or viewing reports & dashboards for management stakeholders and so on.
Each Persona has a workspace to get their pending tasks completed, fulfil the relevant forms or tables to be created or updated (Example – customer onboarding or employee services to be fulfilled or customer request to be addressed) which allows the user to interact with the application and also view the relevant data visualisations for taking suitable actions.
There will also be the need to create portals for login to do self-service and perform various actions that employees will be tasked to do on this application. These portals are dynamic with several widgets to trigger required workflows for action. It is important to define all the Use Cases which needs to be designed or built using automation software development toolset. It is desired to keep such modernizing of applications to a timeline of 10-12 weeks and have a beta version for use by different personas so that their feedback is incorporated. Subsequent versions can be planned with new features after the application has gone live.
As one modernizes legacy applications, keep in mind the need to migrating core data (master data, tables) as well has the historical data so that the new application delivers value from day one. The effort in design and planning data migration should not be underestimated. Most cloud-based development platform provides a complete lifecycle for Development, Test, UAT and Production instances to ensure quick deployment. There are also Test Frameworks and DevOps toolsets to ensure the most modern tools are available for modernizing the legacy applications.
No application would be complete without some decent reporting and dashboard capabilities built into the platform to ensure Management and Operational views of data sliced by time period, organisational entity, product types, geography and several data attributes are available.
Modern development toolsets also provide integration toolsets for custom integration and Spokes to connect to several cloud-based services. These ensure quicker time to build solutions (mostly configuration based) and ensure users can start adopting the new systems in weeks.
Only by adopting new age Lo-Code/No Code platforms for Application Modernization like ServiceNow App Engine, can one hope to bridge this increasing gap between the demand for new age applications and availability of quality coders.