As businesses continue to rely heavily on technology to drive growth and innovation, the importance of modernizing outdated applications has become a top priority for CIOs and IT teams. With this in mind, EvolveWare commissioned an independent survey to gain current insights into IT teams' strategies and preparedness for modernization initiatives, revealing some surprising contradictions to common assumptions around modernization priorities and goals. It has also highlighted a curious disconnect between IT leaders' perception and the reality of their overall readiness, their ability to secure legacy talent, and the availability of the much-sought-after technology capabilities.
Key findings include:
Confidence in understanding of applications wanes as projects progress
A comparison of the confidence in knowledge of applications being modernized between those who have not yet begun their modernization projects (41% very confident) to those who have already begun projects (28% very confident) reveals a notable drop. This is likely an indication that organizations only start to realize the level of knowledge needed for these efforts after they execute on the project plans.
Many respondents also base their confidence on having personnel with knowledge of these legacy systems. This is a clear blindspot for IT leaders, as a full 81% of respondents say they currently have — or anticipate — challenges hiring and/or retaining legacy programming talent. This shortage of specialized IT talent will only continue to grow as employees retire and expertise in legacy systems continues to decline.
IT Teams and the rest of the C-Suite may not be aligned on modernization goals
The number one modernization motivation for IT team respondents is boosting employee productivity (40%). This is opposed to commonly cited rationales such as improving customer experience (29%) and migrating to the cloud (22%). However when looking at success measures, increasing business efficiency is in the bottom two chosen, which boosting employee productivity would typically be related to. This discrepancy seems to imply that while IT teams are looking to address challenges they face with maintaining legacy applications, possibly due to lack of documentation and/or lack of qualified personnel, they must also justify these projects in terms that are important to business leadership.
Reasons most often cited by the C-Suite for modernization are directly related to increasing revenue and profits, such as moving to the cloud to improve customer experience and reduce costs. The disconnect indicates that IT teams, who have their own modernization motivations, must find ways to align with the C-Suite who are defining tangible measures of success, prior to executing on these projects.
IT teams lack of awareness and access to modern tools
Most respondents don't believe they have access to the capabilities they want. For example, more than half would like to automate code transformation and business rules extraction (BRE) to a large degree, and 40% want to automate application documentation creation. Similarly, 64% believe freezing code during the modernization process will have significant business and financial consequences, and a full 59% say the ability to modernize without freezing code is on their technology wish list, making it the top most requested modernization capability. Yet while these, and other technologies on their wish lists, are available in the current modernization market, no more than 31% of IT leaders say they have access to them.
The ability to successfully modernize will be a key differentiator for businesses as they navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape. While the process can be complex and challenging, insights into potential blind spots and disconnects can help IT leaders develop more effective strategies and make the most of their available resources and technological advancements.
The Latest
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...
Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...
Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...
When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...
Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...
The only way for companies to stay competitive is to modernize applications, yet there's no denying that bringing apps into the modern era can be challenging ... Let's look at a few ways to modernize applications and consider what new obstacles and opportunities 2023 presents ...
As online penetration grows, retailers' profits are shrinking — with the cost of serving customers anytime, anywhere, at any speed not bringing in enough topline growth to best monetize even existing investments in technology, systems, infrastructure, and people, let alone new investments, according to Digital-First Retail: Turning Profit Destruction into Customer and Shareholder Value, a new report from AlixPartners and World Retail Congress ...