application modernization strategy and roadmap

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Application modernization strategy a quick look

Business agility and cost reduction are two fundamental factors that drive modernization. Added to this are the growing echnology obsolescence. According to Gartner, by year-end 2010, more than one-third of all application projects will be riven by the need to deal with technology or skills obsolescence. Forrester's new survey revealed that modernizing key egacy applications is the top software initiative for businesses this year (2009).

Rising cost of maintenance, integration challenges, technical skill obsolescence, demanding market and industry regulation changes are front runners business cases for legacy and application modernization strategy. Just as you define another wave of your organizational SOA maturity model, modernization is tied into, and is enabled by service oriented architecture. Modernization starts with organizational readiness. Just as in every business transformation journey, it is necessary that your modernization strategy is strongly supported by your organization. If you consider this is an IT department job, forget it. Your business should drive the need for modernization and IT should be the thought leader and evangelists to socialize this idea to the business.

Modernization is a multi-year effort and it takes different variations such as IT Modernization, technology modernization, application modernization, legacy modernization and the list continues. No matter how you define it the approach and challenges are applicable to all. Moving your legacy code to JAVA does not complete your modernization. Personally, I feel that is language conversion. But definitely it is a forward step towards the modernization cycle. There is no tool available in the market today that could do this conversion 100% accurate and automatic. Although many vendors offers services to extract your legacy business logic and convert them into JAVA or similar code. Your vendor could easily translate them into service components as your require.

Your modernization strategy may be a multi-phase, multi-wave milestone driven plan. At each phase you may now fuse the milestones with smaller waves. The best way is to phase it by business domains. Modernization can start in many ways, but typically it starts with language conversation, business process re-engineering, data mining, rules mining and analyzing these business domains. Setting up SOA ahead or the same time with modernization will shorten your overall plan. It would not be a surprise to see that some of the modernization starts with a SOA initiatives or SOA drives the modernization needs.

Defining your business services domain helps you to quick start your modernization journey. One easy way is to define your functional areas and key processes supporting those. Your modernization roadmap should also include data migration and meta data management strategy. You could start with one of the core business processes such as origination. Once you define key processes under origination (applications, intake, pre-approvals, channels, promotions..etc) you could start moving those components away from your legacy systems and expose them as services. This cycle repeats for risk, approval, underwriting, closing, funding, servicing and other areas.

However, easier this may sound, the challenges and road blocks is huge, you should conduct detail analysis and due diligence before you endeavor your modernization journey.

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