The business landscape has been significantly changed by digital transformation
New organizations with innovative approaches emerge and deliver services in a more efficient and direct way.
Businesses operating for years are now seeking suitable solutions to answer the needs for digital improvement and innovation. However, one of their main obstacles is the legacy systems and applications that need to be updated or completely rewritten.
What are Legacy Applications?
Legacy applications are software programs that have been written for a system that is obsolete. To keep them running, developers separate the apps into smaller modules that can be rewritten or refactored without disrupting the processes in the actual application. They also create a dependency chain that isolates the modules and evaluates what can affect the performance of the whole application. Legacy applications lack modularity and flexibility, and usually carry a lot of deprecated code that is difficult to maintain, update or refactor. Moreover, it’s often a challenge to find software developers who can support them.
The Legacy Applications Challenge
The digital transformation has enabled many organizations to use advanced tools that help them perform real-time operations, improve user experience, and access complex analytics. These innovative technologies are one of the top reasons customers nowadays choose one service over another.
Therefore, companies are forced to ensure cutting edge technologies but are often pressured by the ever-changing digital landscape. They have a repository of legacy applications that need to be rewritten or refactored, which means reimplementing every part of the code in a way that will not affect the end-user experience. Such an ambitious endeavor can take months or even years.
New Tools Improve User Experience and Operations
To ensure a smooth legacy application migration, organizations can take advantage of innovative software solutions that improve workflow and adapt legacy applications to a unified user experience through interoperability.
Such an example is Glue42 which is an interoperability framework that allows organizations to integrate their legacy applications with new applications in a unified innovative environment.
Proven Approaches to Legacy Application Modernization
New technologies can lead to efficient workflow management. But how does an organization start its digital transformation journey?
First, an organization should begin with a complete audit of its digital infrastructure. To accelerate digital transformation, it can work with software technology leaders that can offer effective ways to successfully reuse legacy systems or applications and deliver an outstanding user experience.
Automation of tasks, faster responses and streamlined processes will significantly cut down human errors and improve employee productivity. In the long term, access to improved technologies will create new ways of serving customers. The improved workflow will also boost employee satisfaction.
After carefully evaluating existing processes and applications, it’s essential to define short and long-term goals. This will also help with estimating the costs.
It is always a clever idea to research some case studies of organizations that have already implemented digital transformation initiatives. In addition to that, the company has to ensure that digital modernization won’t interrupt essential business operations.
Finally, explaining the benefits of all new technologies and initiatives to employees would ensure a smooth transition.
Conclusion
Modernizing legacy applications or systems provides development opportunities, optimizes existing processes, and ensures cost efficiency. Refactoring and integrating new platforms enhances the digital capabilities of any business. Legacy applications modernization is a long process that will eventually transform the core business models.
About the Author
Tanya Karamfilova is a Full-Stack Marketing Expert at Glue42 – an award-winning desktop integration platform that simplifies user journeys across native and web applications. She has experience in B2B marketing across different industries.
