How GE Healthcare is dealing with modernization will be instructive as you chart your own modernization path forward.
Enterprises are seemingly stuck.
They have a bunch of legacy applications hanging like albatrosses around their necks, inhibiting their ability to compete and deliver new experiences to their customers, employees, and partners.
As a result, there is tremendous pressure to refresh interfaces and update these legacy applications to make them fit into our expectation of how a modern application should function.
For some applications, the decision is easy. Whether because of their simplicity or criticality, enterprise organizations just suck it up and build a new, modern application from scratch. But with many other applications — most, in fact — it’s a much more difficult situation.
Either because of their complexity or because they are essential to the organization, but not necessarily delivering competitive value, it does not make sense for the organization to spend precious resources and capital immediately rebuilding these applications in a cloud-native fashion.
At the same time, however, enterprise leaders know that they still need the ability to manage these legacy applications in a modern, dynamic, cloud-like environment as they undergo their transformation.
We refer to this entire process as modernization, and while it’s a nice catchphrase, executing it leaves many enterprise leaders stuck in a conundrum, unsure of how to implement it and even unsure of what it means in a practical sense.
The good news for enterprise CIOs is that you’re not alone. Well established vendors that produce commercial software are in much the same situation. How one of these organizations, GE Healthcare, is dealing with modernization and the three principles that it is intrinsically applying will be instructive as you chart your modernization path forward.
