Uncovering New Opportunities Through Application & Data Modernization

The world of business is changing rapidly, at a pace never before seen. CIO estimates that companies spent $2 trillion on digital transformation initiatives last year, and Forbes reports that over two-thirds of businesses have a formal digital transformation initiative underway. If you’re not investing in digital, you’re at risk of falling behind your competition.

For many organizations, understanding where to begin modernizing their technology stack or application portfolio is challenging — and some simply don’t take any action. Those companies quickly find themselves wrestling with major process inefficiencies, unnecessary costs, and frustrated stakeholders.

Organizations at the cutting edge are embracing application and data modernization. Prioritizing these critical areas improves business efficiency, drives innovation, and helps capture the benefits of modernization across technology, people, processes, and performance. Here’s a closer look at how your organization can uncover new opportunities through application and data modernization, and how SoftwareONE can help your organization achieve its most important objectives.

An outdated application management strategy has a profound impact on your business. Essential processes and employee productivity grind to a halt. The customer experience fails to deliver the efficient, seamless, and flexible solutions that today’s consumers demand. It becomes impossible to keep pace with the competition. There’s a point at which outdated IT assets become a significant business liability.

Some of the most common signs clients highlight that can suggest they’re falling victim to an outdated application management strategy include:

• A decrease in sales, customer satisfaction, or market share that is at least partially due to a poor digital experience or lack of a digital option.
• Processes and workflows that fail to leverage the latest technology and become outdated, unwieldy, and inefficient as a result.
• Declining IT productivity and an inability to roll out new functions or features or address requests leveraging the current technology offerings.
• Visibly falling behind competitors that offer new customer experiences, service delivery models, projects, and more.
• Difficulty responding to requests for IT support, addressing customer concerns, or exploiting new opportunities in real-time.
• Challenges in accessing data, embracing new options such as automation and machine learning, or easily integrating communications across platforms.

Some organizations shy away from the idea of digital transformation because they imagine it will require replacing essential applications they have come to rely on and trust. Yet time and time again, it’s been shown that digital transformation can be achieved through the strategic management of your applications portfolio and finding solutions to capitalize on existing applications. Ultimately, these upgrades can help transform your applications by implementing reliable, easy-to-scale, agile databases.

An expert partner can help you navigate factors such as:

• Evaluating your existing application estate to identify options for improvement and strategies to capitalize on them.
• Assessing the functionality and user experience of each application to highlight opportunities for incremental improvements that move the needle on performance.
• Decoupling the data layer from applications and increasing the ability to share and utilize data through APIs, data automation, and improving communications tools.
• Identifying solutions to improve performance through migrating applications to the cloud or revisiting the way applications are used within the organization.

Modernization is one essential component of a robust application management strategy. True digital transformation also requires that you evaluate opportunities to enhance the organization, performance, and automation of your company’s data. Many organizations find themselves running legacy databases that have outlasted their usefulness and struggle to keep up with or simply can’t support the latest technologies. Outdated data management strategies can put mobile-friendly solutions, AI and automation, cloud computing, and other emerging technologies out of reach.

When the data management strategy isn’t modernized, companies face many challenges including, but not limited to:

• Limited ability for real-time and cross-organizational data analysis and sharing.
• Time-consuming management and maintenance for monolithic database systems.
• Expenses to maintain, keep up, and provide ongoing support to these databases.
• IT skills gaps for individuals familiar with and willing to work on these tools as they become increasingly outdated.
• Facing mandatory database upgrades and sunsetting older products.
• Difficulty complying with regulatory compliance and other data-related laws, guidelines, and industry best practices.

The business drivers encouraging data modernization are significant, and organizations that overcome these challenges quickly experience the benefits of stable, flexible, and scalable databases. Data strategies can be aligned with organizational goals and rolled out across the business to a variety of platforms. Leaders have access to the latest tools, data insights, and technical support to run their business while reducing both costs and the time it takes to complete data-related projects.

Ultimately, a successful digital transformation is as much a mindset shift as a technological one. It’s easy to assume that digital transformation begins and ends with your technology stack. However, today’s most successful adopters recognize that digital transformations that have a lasting impact align three key elements of the organization:

• People – Create a digital transformation and technology-oriented culture with a team that has the skills, vision, and commitment to fully embrace digital.
• Processes – Optimize and modernize your processes for maximum efficiency, to help improve the ROI of your technological investments and remove friction from core processes.
• Performance – Align all aspects of your digital transformation to support what matters most: your customer experience.

Finding the right partner can make navigating the path to digital transformation a smoother, more streamlined, and more cost-effective process. SoftwareONE’s Digital Transformation Advisory  Service offers clients access to one of the industry’s most advanced teams, with decades of combined experience navigating all aspects of the digital transformation process.

Our approach is unique in the industry. SoftwareONE understands that digital transformation goes beyond simply embracing new technology. Without changing the underlying business processes, companies don’t reap the full benefits of their efforts. As a result of leveraging people, processes, and performance objectives, our Digital Transformation Advisory has a lasting impact on our clients.

Building on our proprietary strategic process, our Digital Transformation Advisory partners with clients to:

• Conduct in-depth assessments of your application and data modernization opportunities and priorities, and then present a roadmap to digital transformation that’s based on industry standards and digital best practices.
• Understand your digital readiness through an assessment of your existing technologies, process, people, and organizational culture, and provide strategic assistance to address gaps across the organization.
• Offer a clear implementation roadmap that’s anchored around your people, processes, and performance that keeps the customer journey and user experience at the center of the plan.

Digital transformation is no longer optional. Companies throughout your industry are investing now to improve internal business processes, develop agile experiences and products that they can get into the market faster, and create winning customer experiences. Don’t get left behind. Now is the time to embrace application modernization and data modernization as a pathway to business growth, innovation, and future expansion. Uncover new opportunities for fostering competitive advantages by looking more closely at your application and data modernization options.

Navigating the modernization process can be challenging, but an experienced partner can help. From assessing the organizational factors that influence your digital transformation to delivering the implementation of application and data modernization, take the leap and partner with an experienced advisory service that can make your digital transformation vision a reality.