A survey of senior IT leaders suggested the level of confidence in application modernization projects that many organizations initially had is now starting to wane.
The survey polled 200 senior IT leaders at organizations with more 1,000 employees and was conducted by Global Surveyz Research on behalf of EvolveWare, a provider of platform for automating application modernization processes. The survey found 70% of respondents reported they were confident or very confident in their understanding of their applications when they prepared for modernization. However, that level of confidence dropped to 41% at the planning stage and even lower (28%) at the point the project began, the survey found.
More than half of respondents (51%) are already experiencing or anticipating critical issues that need to be addressed immediately, the survey found. The top areas of importance are understanding the parts of the code that contain business policies (47%), database access details (43%) and understanding the complexity (40%).
EvolveWare CEO Miten Marfatia said the survey makes it clear organizations are encountering issues associated with capturing tribal knowledge that has been lost mainly because the teams that initially built an application are no longer with an organization. In fact, the survey found a full 81% of respondents reported they currently have or anticipate challenges hiring or retaining talent to support legacy applications. Nearly half (46%) currently don’t have enough talent available to manage legacy applications.
The survey found the primary reason these initiatives are launched is to boost employee productivity (40%), followed by retiring mainframe infrastructure (37%), reducing the dependency on legacy code (36%), reducing maintenance costs (30%), improving customer experience (29%) and cloud migration (22%). Most of these projects are generally focused on critical applications (55%) as well as applications that have few or no dependencies (55%), the survey finds.
The primary success metrics for assessing these projects, however, are improving customer experience (46%), the readiness to migrate to the cloud (46%) and meeting the performance requirements of the modernized application (45%).
Less than a third of respondents (31%), however, reported having access to modern tooling. More than half would like to automate code transformation and business rules extraction (BRE) while 40% would like to automate documentation.
Nearly two-thirds (64%) said freezing code during the modernization process would have significant business and financial consequences, with 59% noting that finding a way to modernize applications without freezing code is at the top of their technology wish list.
Application modernization efforts usually have multiple goals. IT teams are usually motivated by a desire to reduce the amount of time and effort required to support legacy applications that are generally less efficient than modern applications. In addition, many IT teams are also looking for ways to reduce the total cost of running those applications, especially during uncertain economic times. Business leaders, meanwhile, are funding digital business transformation initiatives that typically require some level of modernization of legacy applications.
Regardless of motivation, it’s apparent many IT teams initially underestimate the amount of effort required to achieve those goals.
