Application modernization road mapping is a vital business capability for any organization. Discover how SAP LeanIX empowers your business to transform.
Building an application modernization road map is key for keeping your business transformation on track. Whether you're migrating to the cloud or looking to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, having a plan with an accurate timescale is the only way to succeed.
Yet, getting from your current state to become the innovative, empowered, modern business that you want to be requires a strategy that's realistic, informed, and accessible to all your stakeholders. To gather all the right information, build it into a plan, and share that with everyone who needs to be involved, you need a digital toolset designed for business transformation.
SAP LeanIX empowers enterprise architects and IT leaders with complete understanding of their IT landscape and allows them to guide their organization into the modern era using key insights and supported data. To unlock your own application modernization road map, leverage SAP LeanIX.
To find out more about application modernization road mapping in SAP LeanIX, download our free guide:
An application modernization road map is a plan for business transformation. Once you upgrade and optimize the digital toolset you use in your everyday work, you'll find your company's productivity will naturally improve, and your organization will thrive.
By assessing your organization's portfolio of software applications, you can identify redundant, legacy, and inefficient applications that can be replaced with best-of-breed solutions. This isn't just a way to enhance your people's work, however, as investment in your application portfolio can actually reduce your costs.
Everything we do in business has a digital footprint in the modern market. From tracking sales to just holding team meetings, we need digital tools to enable our work.
Those tools cost money to run and the return on that investment is dependent entirely upon their efficiency. Spending money on tools that don't empower your workers is a waste of resource, but a bigger impact can be felt in increased productivity and employee motivation from better software.
As ServiceNow CEO, Bill McDermott asked:
"How do companies deflect the pressure from their people using digital technology? How do companies avoid having employees swivel-chair between 13 applications, on average, a day, burning up 33% of their productivity? And now, how do companies take generative AI to completely rethink the game in terms of their business processes?"
identifying unneeded applications to retire can give you back the money to invest in purchasing software that drives revenue. Not to mention, with a deep understanding of how your IT landscape works, you can ensure all your applications work together in synergy.
So, the key to success in your modernization initiative is to analyze your current application portfolio, the alternatives that are available to you, and the right way to leverage innovative technology like the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI). That requires the right viewpoint.
Often, your application modernization road map will send you migrating to the cloud in order to leverage the reduced costs and increased scalability that unlocks. However, we're seeing many organizations that went all-in on the cloud start to walk their estate back to on-premise.
This isn't because the cloud doesn't have value, but just that a hybrid approach, with some of your applications and data in the cloud and some on-premise, is usually best. Knowing what to put in the cloud and what to keep on-premise, and building a plan for migration, is vital to finding value in app modernization.
For example, tools that don't contain confidential information and need to be accessed by remote workers, such as Zoom, can be hosted in the cloud. Confidential, regulated data and applications that need to offer optimal performance, even when your internet connection is unstable, should be kept on-premise.
Once again, the key to this is to understand your current and potential application portfolio. Doing so means you can choose what to put in the cloud with confidence and ensure all your applications form a synchronous, co-ordinated machine that drives all your operations.
We've previously explored the reasons why organizations are walking back from the cloud. Read our previous post to find out more:
An application modernization road map is vital for your journey from inefficiency and obsolescence to productivity and innovation. Traveling from your current location to where you want to be will always involve following a path, and app modernization is no different.
Planning a route, however, means knowing where you are, where you want to be, and how to get between the two. To modernize your application portfolio, you need to understand your current state, have a comprehensive vision of your ideal IT landscape, and a detailed plan for transforming from one to the other.
This is why that application modernization road map is so desperately important. It's your co-ordinating battle strategy to revolutionize your operations.
Having a detailed timeline for what needs to be changed and when will give you the rallying cry you need to assemble all your stakeholders, ensure nothing is missed, and keep your progression on track. Having a prepared plan also means you can map your vision against your eventual results to prove your success.
To build that road map, you need to have comprehensive information on each of your applications that you can assess to determine what you want to keep, what you need to retire, and what you need to find a replacement for. You can then prioritize and scope your transformation plan and share that with your entire organization to bring everyone in on the project.
To act as a central source of truth for your project, however, your current IT landscape map, your vision, and your road map all need to be stored in the same place and that needs to be accessible to everyone in your organization. That place is SAP LeanIX.
Building an application modernization road map requires storing all your application information within one solution. This is precisely what SAP LeanIX was designed to do.
Log all your information about your applications within SAP LeanIX fact sheets that you can customize with all the fields and data that you need. This can then act as a single source of truth about your IT landscape, before, during, and after your transformation.
Any missing information can be gathered through customizable integrations and automated user surveys. You can then analyze and visualize all that information in shareable dashboards.
Beyond this, you can use SAP LeanIX as a sandbox environment to design your vision for a target IT landscape. Not to mention, you can use it to build your road map between the two stats, all informed by your own application data.
Our customers tell us that their organization's leaders have even started asking them to see live information directly within SAP LeanIX, rather than summaries and presentations. We're seeing SAP LeanIX move beyond just a tool for enterprise architects, and become a vital part of day-to-day business operation.
To find out more about application modernization road mapping in SAP LeanIX, download our free guide: