Making the Business a First-Class Citizen During the Application Modernization Journey

Editor's Notes

1. For far too long we have had IT and “THE BUSINESS” We need to shift our focus away from our business partners focused on new features and truly make them product owners This includes helping them understand what it takes to run a system every day By shifting the focus of both the business and IT to focus on how do I deliver capabilities, you are able to build simple business cases for application modernize What we have done at Accenture is steal from the Agile concept of As A, I want, so that to create a way for both business partners and IT engineers to simply understand and building a common language around application modernization In this example, you can see how we create a simple story line that allows both groups a seat at the table.. While this framework only shows an L0 and L1, you can continue to allow for fine gained L2 and below to support your organizations view of products/capabilities.
2. At Accenture we see the disposition, priority, and value/cost drives all interacting and informing each other. Often depending on your place in an organization, you may be concerned with one or two of these items for a single application, but rarely do we find a team that is thinking holistically about applications. If you want to increase top line growth you might elect do go with a more aggressive disposition of re-image or re-arch, but that takes longer and cost more. If you want to do a data center exit, that might push you towards re-host/re-platform with a high priority…. Net Net, you can not decide on a single piece of this pie in a bubble. You will need to look across all three areas.
3. In the past we have looked at the disposition as a function of technical goals: Align to tech arch, reduce TCO, or leverage Cloud capabilities. But we need to expand our thinking to include two key goals. First, business agility. This allows us to make commitments to our business partners and work at the speed of our business. Second, is what Accenture calls New IT skills. We believe that 70% of training/learning is on the job learning. The best way to transform your workforce is to have people do Cloud work. Aligning your organizational goals with the cost/time that your organization is willing to invest makes all parts of the organization acknowledge the goals and objectives of any migration/modernization
4. Another key area we see our clients fail at completing application modernization, is ANALYSIS PARALYSIS. Again leveraging Agile, we created a process that allows us to disposition applications, just in time. Ensure that as we begin to migrate application we are always learning and creating feedback loops that allow us to get better every day