Who Needs To Replatform?
February 2nd,2022 in Blog
Does your organization stand to benefit from replatforming an application or system? In this blog post, we define Replatforming and identify the characteristics of the organizations across common market segments with the most to gain from it.
At Intelliware, Replatforming is our proven process of renovating and migrating a legacy application to take advantage of modern technologies, environments, and architectures.
For us, moving an application or system to a compliant cloud is just the start. When properly orchestrated, Replatforming enables organizations to develop powerful technologies-as-services. And ideally, Replatforming enables them to learn and adopt development best practices as well. We take a “strangler fig” approach which tackles replatforming incrementally and dramatically reduces the risk of the conventional “Big Bang” approach. Read more about the strangler fig approach.
Scaleups represent one of the most exciting and dramatic beneficiaries of Replatforming. Unlike the average bootstrapped start-up with limited resources, a scaleup company has already received series funding from external investors. Scaleups have employees, a viable business model, and an existing technology product or service.
Scaleups will often have weaknesses in their software architecture and code that will be revealed upon a close look at their technologies. These weaknesses can often be attributed to early development challenges or trade-offs encountered in the start-up phase. For example, the application may only work on a single device, like an iPhone, or the application may have security vulnerabilities. Read our post on application security for common issues.
Beyond bringing the code up to enterprise standards, scaleups owe it to themselves to explore the potential of their application from a customer perspective. To evolve their platform, it might be necessary to (re)align the experience they offer with the expectations of modern users by following user-centric discovery practices like interviews and persona development.
A proven development framework, such as our Four Ps approach described below, integrates all these best practices. Four Ps provides scaleups with guidance, structure, and support to replatform their technology incrementally and learn and adopt Agile methodologies and processes as they develop.
Market opportunities compel credit unions, banks, pension plans, insurance companies, and other financial organizations to replatform. These companies might want to roll out a new product or service, automate processes, or enhance their customer experience to meet today’s user expectations.
Behind the scenes, financial organizations invest millions to integrate legacy applications, automate delivery systems, modernize their mobile apps and advisor tools, and leverage new advances in data analytics and machine learning. So, what holds them back from Replatforming their legacy applications? One big obstacle is the complexity of migrating from legacy technologies. Few development firms have a depth of technical expertise working with financial services systems. Old technology requires experienced technical support from an increasingly smaller pool of developers with knowledge of old platforms–an unsustainable situation by any measure. Many of these specialists plan to or have already retired.
How do financial services companies move forward successfully? Make a meaningful cultural and systemic change by partnering with a team that offers the engineering and architecting expertise to tackle complexity successfully.
Mature technology enterprises face the most disruption from competitors as they must balance the needs of the marketplace with their customers’ expectations. These enterprises have hundreds of employees, established product and service portfolios, and long-standing customer/client relationships.
However, as they scale, mature technology firms reach a point where changes become onerous. Their development teams cannot keep up with the volume of changes required, which impacts their customer relationships. Handcuffed by their technologies and practices, the one-time disruptors become the disrupted as scrappy scaleups use their revolutionary technologies to gain significant market share.
What should mature technology firms do? Capitalize on Replatforming as an opportunity to “level up” their development team. Make co-teaming a development priority. Re-focus and innovate agnostically with an expert source of guidance and training in Agile best practices.
Informed by 20 plus years of Agile development expertise working with scaleups, financial enterprises, and mature technology firms, Intelliware’s Four Ps approach provides four models to help analyze and design your Replatforming strategy.
Program -> The business oversight, roadmap, management, operations, and measurement of efforts related to the Product
Product -> The code, technologies, and architecture of the actual running system
Pipe ->How features are planned, built, tested, and deployed
Place -> The environments the Product runs in, from dev and QA to staging and production