The problem

While the world adapts to rapid change, legacy applications/technology continue to hold organizations back from growing and responding to evolving business needs. Slow, outdated processes can build up technical debt resulting in increased time and cost on day-to-day business operations. Without the technical expertise and capacity in-house to tackle this challenge, many organizations are slow to innovate and take advantage of modern features and capabilities.

Benefits of Enterpsie Application Modernization

Maintaining legacy systems can be time consuming and ties up resources to aging systems that may no longer be compatible with modern technologies. Users spend valuable time each day “fighting” with the software systems that either don’t do what they need or are full of bugs that require manual work arounds. When you modernize legacy applications with Imaginet’s Enterprise Application Modernization services, your organization leverages our expertise to…

• Utilize modern technology – New technologies enable new functionality that didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago. Complex functions and routines can be programmed faster, often leveraging routines and calls that require less overall coding effort compared to legacy systems.
• Improve business operations – Legacy applications seldom reflect current business processes. As a result, end users have to use a variety of applications, enter information to multiple places, export to Excel, and perform “work arounds” just complete daily business processes. All this wasted time is a hidden cost that takes away from your people’s productivity.
• Reduce maintenance and support – Fixing bugs, patching servers, updating integration points are all IT activities that don’t drive new business value. Maintaining old software is very costly especially because there is often or one or a few people that know how to fix it. Hiring new staff to support decades old systems is almost impossible.
• Enhanced security- Application security standards have changed a lot in since many legacy applications were written. Proper authentication, SSO, and modern user permission policies are often impossible with legacy software architectures. The result is software that is susceptible to unauthorized access, and often requires a unique sign-in procedure for users, which can be compromised.

What we offer

Imaginet has successfully helped many companies with their modernization projects, from small to medium sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Imaginet’s blended teams of architects, business analysts, UX analysts and QA and development leads provide a broad set of capabilities to uncover the needs and objectives of your business in the modern workplace.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Imaginet’s approach is typically founded on Microsoft technology stacks, with Microsoft Azure being our preferred cloud hosting partner. Imaginet relies on key business stakeholders to ensure that the roadmap meets the goals of the customer. Imaginet delivers documentation, UX designs, testing plans and test artifacts, along with code, and works with the customer’s Operations team to establish reliable release pipelines for newly modernized software.

Experience the Imaginet difference

Our Approach to Enterprise Application Modernization:

Imaginet’s approach is to perform a detailed assessment of the current state of your enterprise architecture, always keeping your business needs top of mind. This involves reviewing as many artifacts as possible: documentation, infrastructure and code where appropriate. From this a roadmap to modernization is produced to guide the customer’s modernization into the desired future state. Once the roadmap is complete, the individual projects take shape. Your suite of applications may include many tools, and the roadmap may include removal, replacement or rebuilding of those tools. Each project then has a full design phase, followed by or more often simultaneously driving the implementation and development of modernized solutions. Delivery includes turning over all the artifacts for the project and helping your DevOps team prepare and execute successful releases, training and transition to support & maintenance.

Assess

In the assessment stage Imaginet’s technical consultants evaluate as many of the artifacts that describe the existing enterprise architecture as the customer can provide to uncover a full inventory of the infrastructure and technology that forms the current application or suite of applications. This involves reviewing how they are built and deployed, how they are hosted, and how they are connected through integrations like APIs or shared data. System documentation, architecture diagrams, and database schemas are examples of key artifacts to be reviewed. Another objective is to build out an understanding of what each part of the solution does to properly fit them into the roadmap towards the future state desired by the customer. Finally, the components are ranked based on projected difficulty, priority, and risk.

Roadmap

In the roadmap stage Imaginet’s technical consultants follow up the assessment by outlining a high-level plan to move from current state to the desired future state. Each component is evaluated to establish if it should be re-built, replaced with COTS software or rolled into another component. Key customer stakeholders help establish priority of objectives and define the dependencies that exist between components, not just from a technical perspective but also according to the business needs. This allows a general plan to be established to drive the project planning to completion. High-level preliminary estimates accompany this plan to help the business justify cost and timelines to decide to move forward or not.

Design

During the design stage Imaginet’s blended team of UX and BA analysts join with lead solution architects and QA lead to work closely with the customer’s key project stakeholders to gather and document detailed requirements, execute user experience workshops, and design sessions to produce wireframes and high-fidelity designs and architect the solution infrastructure and technical architecture, along with testing plans. These deliverables form the basis for the development of the solution. Imaginet normally executes the design phase as part of an Agile methodology, using an iterative approach that allows development to commence with completed designs and requirements while other design work is ongoing.

Implement

Depending on the size and complexity of the modernization effort Imaginet executes development stages by providing 1-3 development teams consisting of a senior lead developer and 1-2 other developers, working closely with a QA analyst. Imaginet follows an iterative, Agile methodology of develop, test, and repeat to deliver features. Imaginet’s teams perform unit and automated testing to validate functionality. The development team also defines and uses DevOps continuous integration and delivery so that features are regularly deployed to testing environments and available for user acceptance testing. Feature development is performed in the priority established by the product owner until the full scope of work is ready for signoff and delivery.

Deliver

By the time the implementation phase is done the customer will have had extensive and repeatable opportunities for user acceptance testing. Delivery of the solution includes helping the customer prepare a production ready environment, extending the DevOps pipelines to enable automated deployment to that environment and executing a detailed release plan. Other key deliverables include the level of documentation requested by the customer, full source code and all testing plans. Imaginet can provide training, usually in the form of training the customer’s trainers. Post-production Imaginet offers standard service level agreements to provide ongoing support and maintenance for the product.

Dont forget to check out our case study on how A leading transportation and logistics management organization contracted Imaginet to modernize some of its existing applications.