2020, the year everything changed and how to use replatforming to manage that change

October 20th, 2020 in  Blog, Replatforming

This Intelliware blog post explains how organizations can manage historic levels of change with a strategic approach to replatforming.

Change. Even before the events of the pandemic changed how we operate, keeping up with the breakneck speed of technological and cultural change concerned every business owner and corporate executive across the country. In truth, navigating change is difficult, stressful, sometimes painful, but always necessary.

“No matter what business you are in, there is change, and it’s happening pretty quickly.” – Jim Pattison

While every organization scrambled this year to respond and adapt to the pandemic, how many companies have a robust plan to pivot and digitally transform their operations going forward? Do they have a post-pandemic plan to take advantage of all the transformative technologies and cloud services on offer?

Unlike previous decades, technology development teams today face so much complexity that few can manage it alone. It takes a large team of technical professionals—developers, QA pros, UI/UX experts, delivery managers, security specialists, among others—to deliver an experience that satisfies the modern user, let alone delights them.

The key to managing change

At Intelliware, where we have successfully designed and built custom software for our clients for over 30 years, we see that the most profound, positive, and enduring change does not happen all at once across an organization. Instead change happens incrementally, over time, almost always starting with one application.

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start your cultural transformation journey by replatforming a single mission critical app that really needs it.

As a decision-maker tasked with making positive change, you can learn from the experience of previous organizations considering how best to handle their replatforming. Organizations that force too much change on their employees or customers at once almost always face very real and costly disruption.

Start with one app

Identify your most important but *most disliked* app or system for replatforming. Ask your team to move and improve your app to take advantage of the best technologies, platforms, and frameworks available in 2020, including security technologies. And give them the technical assistance they need by partnering with experts, like Intelliware.

Embrace change. Use this time to double-down on your digital transformation with a robust roadmap and a new winning app.

When you replatform an app successfully, employees, and customers embrace it. It becomes a big win. And that win earns trust and excitement, which overcomes the uncertainty and loss aversion, opening the door to a broader modernization effort. In this way, over time, one replatforming app eventually leads to another until a company’s digital transformation is complete.

Ontario Teacher’s partnership with Intelliware is a good example of this type of digital-transformation-from-the-inside-out. As one of Canada’s largest pensions, this group manages a massive portfolio of assets on behalf of its members. Ontario Teacher’s collaboration with Intelliware has yielded multiple operational solutions and ultimately revitalized their technical culture, enabling them to focus on innovation. 

Ready to discuss your replatforming? Our experts can conduct an accelerated discovery process to help you refine your strategic approach.