Follow us each week over the next month as we share with you a best practices approach to leading your next IT Modernization project. We will outline a four phased method that can be reused for any client engagement that aims to have an IT modernization project. If you are a Digital Transformation Leader and need to stabilize your organization’s core operations before introducing new digital use cases then this next set of blog posts are written for you.
The following guidance is an extract from our new e-book titled “Leading Digital Transformation Initiatives: a business transformation guide for technology leaders“.
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Start your IT Modernization journey as digital enablement
An IT modernization is the fourth of the four perspectives in which to lead a digital transformation initiative. After exploring the user, process, and information needs from the perspectives of new ways of working, new ways of funding, and new ways of sourcing for an organization, the discussion can turn to the required technologies that are required to implement the change and business goals. By not introducing new technologies to simply try and find needs, the strategic focus will remain on understanding the problems and opportunities that must be prioritized and then matched to candidate solutions represented by technology investments.
The journey in planning an IT modernization for legacy organizations that are not cloud native from their inception will often require technology changes to be made in different stages. The responsibility of managing existing infrastructure and applications requires IT teams to stay ahead of availability, resiliency, and security needs which can be translated as the need to make decisions if, and more importantly when, to apply patches, upgrades, and replacement of the IT. Workforce capacity limitations and competing priorities for known changes, shortage of budget to entertain non-mission critical changes, and lack of agility in responding to immediate threats, eventually will result in increased vulnerability and an elevated risk profile for the organization. As such, an IT modernization may start with a scope defined by IT as its own business client to eliminate and mitigate risks and perform measures to increase the organization’s security posture. The terms Aging IT and technical debt are used inter-changeably to be the pillars of an IT modernization, however, if the intent is to stabilize the operations, then the recommendation is to name this step in the IT modernization journey as the necessary Stabilization phase which aims to reduce risk and increase resiliency of existing IT assets that must continue to be managed.
Organizations that lack maturity in user and outcomes driven practices, such as human centered service design, have not achieved strong Business-IT co-creation of strategy, and do not manage the lifecycle of assets tend to be reactive in nature. In such environments, Stabilization requirements will be flagged by the need to immediately react and make decisions without ample time for options analysis or true validation of business need. Common examples of making IT investment decisions with limited choice as a result of poor planning and insight may include: renewal of licenses that expire within the current fiscal quarter, upgrading hardware and software that is a few months from end of support, or possibly upgrading applications that are deemed mission critical and must occur outside of the organization’s annual strategic planning cycle. The lack of insight across the full IT environment will eventually force any IT modernization to address fixing foundational problems first as a stop-gap measure before progressing to true modernization opportunities.
Gain insight to your IT environment
When leading an IT modernization, you must have insight to the full IT environment and be capable of assessing the current state environment’s business fit and technical condition. In this manner, you will make informed decisions based upon priority needs versus being at risk of following the loudest voice in the room.
As the digital transformation lead, you must encourage the following practices be followed to help gain insight to the IT environment.
- Application Inventory – follow application portfolio management practices and catalogue all of the organization’s applications and note the enabling technology and infrastructure, the business services that are supported and if the services are mission critical, the responsible team(s) or vendor(s), and if the application is deemed to be meeting business needs
- Technology Capabilities – just as any organization can be described in terms of its business model and operating model, so too can an organization’s IT portfolio. The technology capabilities are a way to classify the common IT needs that span across compute, storage, network, facilities, and the need to manage each capability.
- Application Rationalization – after having an understanding of the application portfolio and the organization’s technology portfolio, a review of the applications and their workloads can be done to identify if the strategic action for an application is to retire, replace, re-host, re-factor, or re-architect.
In our next article we will dig deeper into the IT Modernization Enterprise Method (ITEM) as your repeatable process to plan and deliver any organization’s IT modernization as a key step toward digital enablement.