BrainBlog for HCLtech by Jason Bloomberg
If enterprises have learned one thing from the Covid era, it’s that digital transformation is more than a handful of projects. Instead, it represents a strategic shift, breaking down organizational and technological silos to better align with the needs of customers and employees.
Enterprises have also learned that digital transformation is never complete. Rather than moving to some stable final state, being a digital organization means dealing with change as an ongoing reality – and leveraging it for competitive advantage.
It’s not good enough to introduce new technology in hopes that all the bells and whistles of modern tech will transform the organization. Even in IT, we must break down the silos – only now, we’re talking in particular about silos of legacy applications.
Application modernization, in fact, is an essential enabler of digital transformation.
Gone are the days where we can simply leave older applications alone, somehow working them into our modern way of working. Today, organizations must not only modernize – they must become adept at modernization.
Remember, change is constant, and so are the modernization needs of the digital enterprise. Application modernization, therefore, must become a core competency for any organization hoping to digitally transform.
Debunking the digital transformation vs. modernization dichotomy
If you venture into the forums and job boards for today’s modern development teams, you’ll see that the majority of the professionals in these lines of work are pursuing the latest and greatest technologies.
Cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, microservices, and service meshes are all the rage. Programming languages like Python, Rust, and Go are the way to go. And indeed, there is a surfeit of demand for such skills, suggesting that these technologies will continue to attract eager technologists for years to come.
Such is not the world, however, of the application modernization effort. Maintaining, evolving, and migrating legacy applications requires a wide range of skillsets specific to those applications, from COBOL to J2EE to various obscure flavors of Unix, to name a few.
Some analysts believe that these two groups of professionals should march by the beat of their respective drummers – legacy folks focusing on slow-moving older technologies while the cutting-edge team moves ever faster, delivering digital solutions to customers.
Relegating these two teams to separate organizational silos, however, goes against the core principles of digital transformation – and in practice, will end up slowing the organization down overall. Organizations must put a strategy in place that will resolve these organizational constraints, and application modernization is in the crosshairs.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
