The soaring popularity of modern-day software approaches like containerization, microservices, DevOps, low-code, and serverless computing, among others, is encouraging enterprises to embark on a quest to redefine all the traditional “rules” of how they design, build, and release their applications. And this sits well with the current business landscape as enterprises across industries are pushing hard to reduce costs, mitigate risks, boost agility, and accelerate delivery cycles – all to stay ahead of their competition.

With these modern application styles becoming an integral part of the enterprise IT landscape, it is utterly essential for enterprises to invest in next-gen technologies that can serve as building blocks to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and keep pace with the market. 

At the center of this next-gen revolution is the strategic move to modernize enterprise applications – a process that not only emphasizes enhancing the overall performance and functionality of applications but also enables enterprises to leverage the full potential of emerging technologies to create innovative, agile, and scalable applications.

This article serves as a guide on how enterprises can modernize their enterprise applications, why they need to modernize in the first place, and what stops them.

 

Why Modernize Enterprise Applications?

Software obsolescence has always been an issue for enterprises. Compatibility, functionality, and security being the foremost problems to tackle after a period of time, thereby rendering applications inefficient in delivering business outcomes. Today, this problem has magnified owing to the fact that applications and systems are regularly updated and upgraded. For example, Android and iOS get regular incremental updates throughout the year. 

Here are the problems that surface when businesses stick with legacy applications for too long:

• These applications fail to leverage the capabilities of technologies like AI, Big Data, and the Cloud.
• They deliver sub-optimal performance owing to poor scalability and high cost of ownership.
• They are difficult to integrate with newer applications owing to obsolete architecture and technologies, thereby making them non-compliant with cloud-native assets or modern CMSs, etc.
• They are difficult to scale owing to inflexible architectures.
• They are infamously vulnerable, especially when it comes to cyber threats.
• They require huge investments for refactoring, bug resolution, updating, and patching – thus contributing to the mounting technical debt.

All in all, failure to modernize enterprise applications not only compromises mission-critical capabilities but also leaves enterprises exposed to all sorts of digital risks, including security breaches and data loss.

 

But, Why Don’t Businesses Modernize Their Applications?

That’s the question for the ages! But, as it stands, it’s not too difficult to understand why businesses shy away from modernizing their applications.

To begin with, it’s an endeavor that requires a lot of planning and coordination before introducing a newer technology into the mix, especially when enterprises are already burdened with having too many systems in place.

The second hurdle is the cost of modernizing – which sometimes, as a rule of thumb, goes beyond the value of an application in itself. In the Infosys Modernization Radar 2022 survey, 23.8% of the CIOs expressed concerns about the cost of embarking on the overhaul. The risk of disruption (26.6%) and lack of in-house skills (50.6%) were also labeled as factors that inhibit enterprises from modernizing their applications.

Another reason for reluctance sources from inherent bias that can be summed up by the sentence – “Why modernize something that is working perfectly fine?” The bureaucratic inertia compounds the issue further, as the organization’s IT department is not amenable to helping change the status quo.

But, if businesses want to experience increased agility, deliver improved customer experiences, reduce technical debt, bolster system integrations, secure data, and retain high-value customers, modernizing their applications should be a priority. They need to come out of the mindset of sticking with what’s proven and justifiable and start viewing modernization as a long-term initiative rather than a short-term fix.

 

So, How to Modernize Enterprise Applications?

Modernizing enterprise applications can be an inherently complex process, for it depends on several critical factors like business continuity, technical infrastructure readiness, and availability of necessary skills. But it doesn’t have to be that way if a logical approach is put forward.

While the modernization journey will vary from one organization to another, the following steps can be templatized to form a foundation for an effective modernization strategy:

 

Develop a Vision and Roadmap

This is meant to set the direction as well as understand the enormity of the task ahead while keeping in mind the targeted business case and the necessary resources, time, and budget. It will also help decide the approach to modernization – for example, whether to pursue a phased or iterative modernization approach. 

Note: Iterative modernization, where the journey is broken down into small batches or phases, enables enterprises to quickly adapt to changing priorities, invite stakeholders into the mix, reduce the risk of disruption, and keep track of the overall progress.

 

Define How the Success Would Look Like

Knowing what success will look like will help the organization to understand how to measure it. This should encourage teams to focus on the key metrics. At times, it might not be feasible or possible to measure success with hard numbers. Instead, define the measurement by the degree of improvement, like a 10% increase in conversions or a 10% drop in support ticket volume.

 

Identify the Easier Path

While some organizations would pursue modernizing the low-hanging fruit, others might want to upgrade more significant systems first. This is where Gartner’s guide to modernization processes comes in handy. Gartner defines (and ranks) seven options by the ease of implementation: encapsulate, rehost, replatform, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, and replace. Choose one that best fits the business case.

 

Adjust the Process and Repeat

The process that’s followed for modernizing a system should be designed with the objective of making the journey as smooth and easy as possible. With actual experience comes definite knowledge about what works and what doesn’t so that obstacles and blockers can be anticipated. So, once you measure the success of a particular step, the process can be tweaked and adjusted to ensure that it becomes safer, cheaper, and faster.

 

Partner With the Right Technology Expert

Of course, it’s possible to self-drive the modernization process; however, that would entail a lot of research, time, and money. In most cases, it would be beneficial for enterprises to seek strategic partnerships with technology partners who have the expertise and resources to ensure the successful modernization of their applications. 

For more information about how an expert technology partner can help drive your application modernization initiative, contact us.

Mobile apps have become a staple in the digital world. And that doesn’t come as a surprise when considering that:

• The usage of mobile phones accounts for 52%of all online traffic
• 55% of companies owned by millennials have a mobile app

In the wake of the mobile-first digital economy, many businesses are building or looking to build their own mobile apps. But in the same vein, they must lend a thought to the practice of catering to modern-day users. For instance, about 61% of users never return to platforms that are not user-friendly.

To that end, creating a mobile app requires attention to detail and a flexible and efficient content management system (CMS) to work across devices. Having the best CMS is not an option anymore, but it has become a necessity in today’s mobile-first world. Let us understand the basics of CMS and how to choose one for your mobile app.

 

What Is a CMS?

A CMS enables editing, managing, and publishing content on multiple channels through a central control system efficiently and seamlessly. Choosing the right CMS can help your business make a difference between the success and failure of mobile apps.

 

How to Choose the Best CMS for Your Mobile App?

1. Omnichannel

The CMS should always be decoupled and combine the API-driven headless architecture with the front-end elements of the conventional CMS to achieve the best of both worlds. It is essential to provide a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints to the customers to drive more sales and accelerate customer loyalty.

2. Microservices Architecture

Modern businesses strive towards microservices architecture to utilize cloud technology to the utmost extent. It disassembles monoliths into a set of specific services developed, deployed, and maintained individually. All services, including payment gateway, inventory management system, and other mobile app functionalities, are connected via API (application programming interface). CMS should be able to slot seamlessly into every system.

3. Framework-Agnostic CMS

While most frameworks are open-source, the CMS should be framework-agnostic and should not be limited to working within the specific framework. The framework agnostic models make it easy to manage content and achieve unrestricted innovation and omnichannel marketing.

4. Intelligent Management of Content Workflow

The content goes through multiple stages, including requesting, sourcing, creating, reviewing, approving, and delivering. It is crucial to manage the workflow intelligently to ensure the highest level of efficiency and collaboration. Along those lines, it’s important to choose a CMS that will guide through a streamlined flow of planning, creation, revision, approval, optimization, publishing, reporting, and reusing content.

5. Scalability

Sudden spikes in online traffic, seasonal user fluctuations, and company-wide expansion can affect the consumption of your mobile apps and the CMS platform. To retain efficiency, choosing a CMS that scales in tandem with various usage patterns is important. The scalable CMS allows you to increase or decrease the capacity while providing resiliency in the face of change.

6. Multiple Language Support

It is essential to understand different user scenarios to achieve better insights into the features of your mobile app. When choosing a CMS, it is necessary to have high-quality translations, with Unicode support and relevant tools to display and edit multiple languages accurately. The pseudo localization tool can be very helpful in simulating translation requirements during the development process to ensure the absence of bugs.

7. Customer Behavior Analytics

CMS should have a powerful analytics tool to gather key user behavior insights and target and personalize marketing initiatives. Data analytics based on keywords and intent helps understand customers’ concerns. These elements can be leveraged to personalize the content and convert more customers. When analytics is combined with content in the CMS, it can help integrate and personalize the content across multiple platforms and yield good marketing results.

 

Get Started to Build Your Mobile App with the Best CMS

Now is the time to give wings to your dream mobile app with the CMS that suits your business goals. The best content management system should be capable of simplifying and ensuring the smooth management of content repositories across multiple devices. Choosing the best CMS platform is not challenging once you keep a check on the aforementioned considerations.

Looking to connect with a CMS expert for your mobile app? Connect with us to build native, cross-platform, or hybrid platform apps with high-end features and performance. Consult your business requirements with us today.

As we gaze upon a future where digital penetration is picking up an explosive pace, businesses in nearly every sector are forced to re-evaluate their priorities to sustain in the race. With consumers demanding highly dynamic services from brands, the role of customer experience becomes more critical than ever before. In fact, market size of over USD 27.13 billion is estimated to come up for customer experience management solutions worldwide by 2026.

If you thought that the need for a seamless customer experience was restricted to sectors like retail and finance alone, then you are deeply mistaken. The influence of superior customer experience in several industries has created a ripple effect in the demands by consumers to experience the same in every interaction they have with a business or service provider.

The tides of change are no different in the case of utility companies as well. Consumers are pulling the strings on utility providers if they fail to match the superior customer experience benchmarks set by businesses operating in retail, finance, and other consumer segments. Utility companies, however, have relatively been slow in adapting their customer experience metrics to the innovative levels demanded by today’s consumers. For a long time, they have relied on manual intensive and error-prone booking and billing mechanisms to serve customers. It has earned them a reputation for being constantly out of favor with customers and seeing periodic jumps from one provider to another citing unfavorable experiences.

There is a new wave of change that utility providers are bringing to their customer experience quotient by adding mobile solutions to their arsenal of customer engagement channels. Nearly every organization in the utility space today has a dedicated mobile app for both iOS and Android operating systems. This is a crucial indicator of why mobile solutions are important for utility companies in highly competitive market conditions.

Let us examine four major reasons why mobile solutions can help utility providers up their customer experience credentials:

 

Enable self-service on the go

With a dedicated mobile app on their favorite smartphone, consumers will now have the flexibility to pick services, leverage support, and request tailored information. All this can be done from their palms right on the dedicated consumer app. Earlier, consumers had to make physical office visits or call up support to figure out billing discrepancies or any other support needs. Such activities can transition into self-service mechanisms that consumers can access on their smartphones from anywhere. This is a huge advantage as it provides convenience for customers from not having to visit a store for getting their concerns heard. They can view or report real-time usage, pay bills, browse historic patterns of bills, and much more all from the comfort of their smartphones.

 

Intuitive customer engagement

Dedicated mobile solutions allow utility companies to harness data from different customer interactions and understand their preferences. By leveraging this insight, they can plan for better customer acquisition, engagement, and retention strategies. By bringing on board an array of innovative technologies like AI-enabled chatbots and machine learning-enabled predictive analytics, utility companies can always stay one step ahead of customers when it comes to fulfilling their expectations.

 

Faster customer support

Adding to the self-service option mentioned above, there is a rising need from consumers to have their fears allayed and concerns sorted out at the earliest through intuitive customer support. A smartphone app offers a direct communication channel for the customer with the technical support team or the relevant team which handles the end-to-end problem resolution management. With the aid of the mobile solution’s credentials such as location, it is possible for support teams to direct field service agents or associates to offer on-premises support at the fastest possible time. Utility providers can capture the location where service is needed easily and route the request to a field service agent that is closest in proximity to the customer. Speedy support can greatly influence the customer experience and will result in better loyalty from customers.

 

Personalized marketing

When customers are equipped with a mobile app, it allows marketers from utility companies to create and deploy more personalized marketing campaigns that are tailored to every user’s needs. For example, they can offer consumption-based discounts to users depending on their historic usage patterns, track referral and other incentivization schemes accurately for each user and drive more engaging conversations tailored to every customer or customer segment.

As we dive deeper into the digital economy, utility companies have to raise the bar in terms of customer experience if they are to remain an attractive choice for digital-savvy customers. Getting a spot on the devices that are now a part of every customer’s digital lifestyle is the most important step in this journey and this is why mobility solutions hold a major rank amongst candidates that bolster the customer experience for utility companies.

For any business organization, building the right team is an integral part of achieving digital transformation in 2022. Digital transformation teams must comprise the right business leaders along with professionals with the latest technical skills and domain expertise.

Starting from 2022, organizations pursuing digital transformation are talking of key technologies like Big Data, cloud computing, cybersecurity, robotic process automation (RPA), and more. Steve Hall of ISG says, “data-driven strategies will lead the investment areas, followed closely by projects to accelerate workloads to the cloud.”

Data-driven strategies are critical for digital transformation and will continue to demand new skill sets in 2022. Let us look at seven roles (or positions) organizations need to fill in their digital transformation team.

 

7 Essential Roles in Digital Transformation Teams

Ideally, any digital transformation team must have the right balance of technical and leadership skills to achieve their desired business results. Here are the 7 essential roles that must be filled in your digital transformation team:

 

1. Chief Data Officer
   As pointed out by Carol Lynn Thistle of Heller Search Associates, “data analytics is a good place to start with any transformation..” Also referred to as the Enterprise data architect, the chief data officer (CDO) is an essential role in any digital transformation team. CDOs are skilled at aligning transformation projects to the business strategy and technology tools with information assetsThe role of the CDO has gained more importance as more organizations look to leverage big data analytics to make smarter decisions. Gonzalo Zarza of Globant talks about the role of CDOs as those who are “responsible for not only developing and enforcing a consistent data strategy but also helping the businesses view data as an enterprise asset with strategic value.”
2. Solution Architect
   Solution (or solution delivery) architect is another key position in any digital transformation team. As pointed out by Gilad Rom of Huan, “organizations need to have the capability to rapidly adapt their operating methods and techniques to meet emerging business challenges and shifting customer preferences.”Solution architects perform the role of designing the technical framework that can be used to meet the customer’s needs. They can connect organizational needs to the technical architect, business strategy, and IT resources. Further, solution architects must be agile to keep track of emerging technologies and frameworks. They also must ‘think’ like project managers, and plan to deliver faster results in any digital transformation project.
3. Data Architect
   CIO.com defines a data architect as those who “visualize and design an organization’s enterprise data management framework, aligned with enterprise strategy and business architecture.” In other words, a data architect can translate business requirements into technical requirements, thus making them an integral component of any digital transformation team.Data architects enable improved data-backed decision-making by creating relevant business cases for data collection. Some of their responsibilities include:
   • Designing the company’s enterprise-level data management framework that can define the data-centric processes.
   • Defining and managing the data flow within the organization.
   • Collaborating with various departments, partners, and external suppliers.
   • Mapping the enterprise applications with the business results.
4. Cloud Architect
   As more organizations move their applications to the public cloud, the importance of the cloud architect will continue to increase in modern enterprises. As pointed out by Rajiv Mirani of Nutanix, cloud architects can “cut across IT silos of networking, compute and storage, build hybrid infrastructures leveraging both public and private clouds, and leverage emerging cloud-native technologies” for digital transformation.Effectively, a cloud architect is responsible for:
   • Bridging the gap between business problems and cloud computing solutions.
   • Translating the technical requirements of any transformation project into the cloud architecture for product building.
   • Working with product developers and DevOps engineers to build the right technology.
5. UI/UX Specialists
   Every digital transformation initiative is aimed at improving the user experience, thus making the user interface (UI) crucial for any delivered product or service. Mike Buob of Sogeti says, “UX resources can map the touchpoints for customers and employees and identify gaps and opportunities to elevate those touchpoints.” The demand for UI/UX experts is on the rise as more organizations look to inculcate design thinking skills into their digital transformation projects.On their part, UI/UX specialists are skilled at understanding the customer journey and at designing the most optimized experience for them when interacting with any product. They bring the crucial element of a “user-centric approach” into any product development effort.
6. Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
   Traditionally, the role of the CISO was limited to protecting IT systems from cyberattacks and external threats. With organizations adopting digital transformation, the CISO’s job role has also changed thus making them a crucial part of any transformation team.With more employees working from home in the pandemic phase, enterprise security is changing thanks to the increase in SaaS applications and cloud migration. Steve Hall of ISG  talks about the need for business enterprises to “embrace partnerships with cutting-edge security firms” to manage the enterprise security risk.The evolving role of the modern CISO has become more strategic and is measured based on their ability to:
   • Accelerate the delivery of business applications and services to the market.
   • Remove any project obstacles from a security angle.
   • Enable rapid development by collaborating with DevOps teams and product developers.
7. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Lead
   Going forward, automation will continue to play a critical role in any organization’s digital transformation strategy. As an emerging technology, RPA can be used in various business cases like improving CX or enhancing the DevOps processes.RPA leads who are skilled at developing business cases with business users and working with DevOps teams will play an important role in any digital transformation team. Keith Sims of Integrity Resource Management describes an RPA lead as a “part project manager, part process engineer, and part technical architect.”
   For the foreseeable future, RPA technology will impact both digital and Internet-of-Things (IoT) transformation, thus making RPA experts a valuable asset in any transformation project.

 

Conclusion

Besides hiring the right personnel in any digital transformation team, organizations must leverage their skills and develop the right mindset to transform their digital capabilities. On their part, digital transformation teams must be creative enough to look at business requirements through the lens of their technical and leadership skills.

Sagacity has supported many organizations in their digital transformation journey by using the right human resource and technologies. Looking for the best next-gen application development?

Reach out to us and get started with your digital transformation journey.