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The Roadmap To Value Driven Strategic Modernization: A Three-Pronged Approach

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An NIT Rourkela alumnus, Rajsekhar is a seasoned business professional with extensive experience in strategy development, solutions & offerings development, ERP implementation programs, product engineering, modernization and capability development areas. He has been associated with Sonata Software for close to three decades now and has been instrumental in its growth story so far.

Digital transformation has been the main topic of discussion in every boardroom meeting across the world lately. Whether to drive cost-effectiveness, improve efficiencies, scale businesses or build resilience and security, digital transformation has seeped into the core of every function in some shape or form. As a result, there is renewed rigor to modernizing legacy systems and simplifying complex environments. Navigating the myriad offerings and aligning it to the broader objectives of the organization requires careful investments in funds and partners. Here’s a three-pronged approach to modernization that organizations can adopt to drive business value.

Unlocking Business Potential: Harnessing Modernization for Agility & Customer Centricity

To achieve agility and competitiveness, enterprises should modernize their mainframe-based business processes. Operational agility can improve supply chain resilience and enhance manufacturing capabilities. Modernization can create seamless collaboration, a digitally-powered workforce, and enhanced customer management to generate new revenue streams. Let’s take the case of a core banking systems. While in the traditional process every transaction involved numerous touchpoints and included manual intervention during onboarding, the automation of business processes in new age core banking system introduced Straight Through Process (STP). Basis the operational framework of core banking system implementation, modernization enables consolidating clearing operations and replacing physical documentation with electronic advices. Modernized systems utilize cloud platforms, eliminate latency issues and enable banks to process transactions in real-time, increase agility and scalability, leading to enhanced customer experience and employee productivity.

Enterprises can leverage multi-level analytics and intelligence-based approaches to resolve operational challenges, mitigate risks and accelerate growth. Advancements in technology have strengthened the confidence in integrating AI-powered support and conversational interfaces to bring greater coherence to customer management. Digitization in healthcare has demonstrated tremendous progress in different domains of AI/ML, cloud computing, biometric user recognition, multiplatform integrations, remote counseling, and so on. Mobile applications offer healthcare professionals access to patient information to improve patient care. Tracking of medical procedures and treatment plans for healthcare professionals, medical staff, patient care coordination, and third-party product integrations are transforming traditional healthcare facilities.

Rehosting can help achieve a seamless migration to the cloud infrastructure while preserving the existing system’s operations and capabilities, thus reducing the risk of disruption

Navigating Technological Evolution: Building Resilience through Strategic Tech Modernization

Organizations are realizing the need to reenergize their core technology systems, enhance data architectures and create coherent operational processes to achieve greater resilience and business outcomes. Creating a robust IT modernization roadmap begins with a feasibility test to determine whether to migrate from on-premises to the cloud or upgrade the existing on-premises infrastructure to embrace cloud native technologies. A more efficient option for legacy modernization is fully automated migration, which uses refactoring technology to convert legacy code and data to modern platforms, while ensuring uninterrupted business operations. It precisely replicates the interface functionality and protocols. With this option, enterprises gain access to innovative functionalities, deliver new benefits to end users, provide a variety of modern relational database-management systems and capture additional business value. Organizations can choose to deploy the refactored system on premise or on the cloud through the rehosting or replatforming approaches.

Often referred to as the ‘lift and shift’ method, the rehosting approach involves transferring an entire legacy system and its accompanying data from an on-premise environment to the cloud. Rehosting can help achieve a seamless migration to the cloud infrastructure while preserving the existing system’s operations and capabilities, thus reducing the risk of disruption. On the other hand, replatforming involves migrating an application to a cloud environment with some modifications to the application’s architecture, code. The goal is to improve the application’s performance, scalability and cost efficiency while retaining much of its original functionality. The choice between rehosting and replatforming depends on various factors including desired performance improvement, budget, and risk appetite of the organization.

Most of the large enterprises are increasingly inclined towards maintaining a hybrid IT infrastructure with a combination of on-premises and cloud-based resources. This approach supports the modern technology platform’s objectives of integrated operations, intelligent automation supporting scalability, automated governance, cybersecurity and the ability to leverage analytics, AI and lean processes. A secure ecosystem is critical to the success of new operating models. One of the focal points for IT modernization is the increased risk of data breaches and cybersecurity attacks. It is essential, therefore, to establish cloud-based security policies, effective utilization of encryption technology aligned with compliance regulations and security protocols.

Rehosting can help achieve a seamless migration to the cloud infrastructure while preserving the existing system’s operations and capabilities, thus reducing the risk of disruption


Charting a Value-Driven Course: Continuous Modernization for Digital Transformation Success

Digital reimagination of core business capabilities aligned with a business value maximization theme should be the primary catalyst for modernizing mainframe legacy applications and transitioning to cloud platforms and SaaS solutions. During the course of modernization, leadership should consistently review projected ROI and maintain oversight on potential business risks. This goal can be realized by employing guided decision trees and carefully structured adoption frameworks. The information should be utilized to measure performance against benchmark and make iterative improvements to the platform.

Digital modernization is inherently an evolutionary process demanding flexibility and agility. Technology leaders should follow continuous modernization by updating delivery processes, employee skilling to minimize the cost, risk and impact of legacy-application optimization. Organizations should ensure that the modernized platform can handle increased traffic and usage as the ecosystem scales. This can pivot an organization’s orientation towards potential business value outcomes rather than focusing solely on process enhancement..