ChapterUK extractEdition Core renaissance Revitalising the heart of IT Tech Trends 2015: The fusion of business and IT B Core renaissance Core renaissance Revitalising the heart of IT Organisations have significant investments in their core systems, both built and bought. Beyond running the heart of the business, these assets can form the foundation for growth and new service development – building upon standardised data and automated business processes. To this end, many organisations are modernising systems to pay down technical debt, replatforming solutions to remove barriers to scale and performance, and extending their legacy infrastructures to fuel innovative new services and offerings. NVESTING in technologies that support Leading organisations are building a Ithe heart of the business has been IT’s roadmap for a renaissance of their core – emphasis since its earliest days – policy focussed not on painting their legacy as the administration, claims management, and “dark ages,” but on revitalising the heart of billing in insurance; order management, their IT and business footprint. resource planning and manufacturing for consumer and industrial products; Business first inventory management, pricing and Amid continuously evolving business distribution for retail; and universal needs pressures and technology trends, several such as finance and human resources. questions arise: How will the core hold up? Core systems drive process and data (Consider, first, the business angle.) How automation, standardisation and intelligence well do existing solutions meet today’s – and represent decades of investment needs? (Consider not just functional in buying packages, building custom completeness, but increasingly relevant solutions and integrating an increasingly dimensions like usability, analytics insights hybrid environment. and flexibility to respond to changing It’s not surprising that on average, 80 business dynamics.) Does the core IT stack per cent of time, energy, and budgets are help or hinder the achievement of day- consumed by the care and feeding of the to-day goals across users, departments, existing IT stack.1 Within the core, unwanted processes and workloads? technical debt2 and complexity likely exist, Of course, underlying technical concerns with systems at various stages of health, are also important. But their impact should maturity and architectural sophistication. be quantified in business terms. Translate But the core can also be a strategic the abstract spectre of technical debt into foundation that enables experimentation business risks. and growth. 1 Tech Trends 2015: The fusion of business and IT Technical scalability can be measured More broadly, consider the organisation’s in terms of limitations on growth – evolving business strategy, be it organic thresholds on the number of customers, growth, new product innovation, mergers orders or payments that can be transacted. and acquisitions or efficiency plays. What Reliability concerns translate into lost role does the core play in seeing that strategy revenue or penalties for missing service unfold? Also consider how to revitalise and level agreements due to outages or service extend current investments by using existing disruptions. A lack of integration or data assets as foundational elements in the future. management discipline can not only delay the backlog of projects aimed at One size does not fit all improving existing services, but also result Core renaissance efforts are born from in opportunity costs by constraining efforts this combined view of business imperatives to build upon the core for new mobile, and technical realities – balancing analytics, social or cloud initiatives. business priorities and opportunities with Most IT leaders understand the looming implementation complexity. Approaches importance of addressing issues in the core. will vary from wholesale transformational In a Forrester survey of software decision efforts to incremental improvements tacked makers, 74 per cent listed updating/ on to traditional budgets and projects. But modernising key legacy applications regardless of how systematic or tactical they as critical or high priority.3 But the are, core renaissance responses typically challenge is shifting from acknowledging include a combination of the following a potential issue to making an actionable five approaches: recommendation with a supporting business case and roadmap. Approaches to core renaissance Replatform Remediate Revitalise Replace the data, the business’s fulfillment of technology footprint interfaces and business transactional layer with some functional areas of infrastructure to logic into reusable, digital extensions (Web, to custom, best-of-breed improve performance extendable services. mobile, social) and user- apps or cloud services. and ability to scale. centric process redesign. technical debt by business instances addressing development visualisation processes and “core” and environments. issues and architectural and discovery tools to in the solution footprint, concerns. improve reporting and removing unnecessary to current analytics on top of dependencies. releases of applications data quality underlying systems. and underlying issues, security and superfluous technologies (libraries, compliance risks. new ideas, or ageing pieces of the (platforms, databases). products and offerings, technology landscape. using core foundation. 2 Core renaissance • Replatform: Replatforming efforts benefit from revitalisation. Approaches typically centre on upgrading the core start with a user-centric, persona-based application or implementing new focus – understanding customer, employee solutions on the underlying platform and partner needs by observing them in upon which the application runs. For ERP, the field. Existing processes, reports or replatforming could involve technical screens shouldn’t constrain new solutions. upgrades, migration to latest software Instead, they should be built around how releases or instance consolidation. For individuals actually should and could any software solution, it might also do their job, empowered by technology. include moving to modern operating Well-designed front-end solutions environments (server, storage or network), allow existing back-end services to be adoption of in-memory databases or hooked into them without much effort; shifting to cloud infrastructure or platform in many cases, however, some degree of services. While it may appear less invasive remediation will be required to support than other approaches, replatforming is revitalisation goals. rarely a simple “lift and shift” exercise. It typically requires a workload-by-workload • Replace: Sometimes, the right answer is to analysis and surgical intervention to recast the solution landscape by replacing prepare for and achieve the shift. parts of the portfolio with new solutions. In industries like insurance and public • Remediate: Similar to replatforming, sector, large-scale custom solutions were remediation shifts attention to the internal often necessary decades ago because of workings of systems. For custom solutions, a lack of commercially viable packaged this could involve rewriting chunks of solutions. New entrants and offerings code to reverse technical debt. For ERP, it have closed many of these gaps, giving might include unwinding customisations institutions a chance to revisit “build” for capabilities now handled by out-of- versus “buy” decisions. Similarly, cloud the-box software or updating modules to offerings can be attractive to companies better manage master data by pointing looking for improved agility and the to a common system of record instead potential to reallocate capital expenditure of having everyone maintain a separate to operating costs. Importantly, IT needs version of customer, product or supplier to be a part of these discussions; otherwise, data. For all software, it might involve lines of business may make their own rewriting or wrapping interfaces to isolated investments. promote reuse, making the necessary logical and architectural changes to allow • Retrench: Retrenchment, simply put, core data and transactions to be exposed means doing nothing. This is likely a part via mobile, social or cloud apps. of any core renaissance journey, especially for non-differentiating parts of the • Revitalise: In some cases, the internal business and IT footprint. Being passive business logic and transactional can be strategic, especially if not taking capabilities are rock solid, but the usability action is a deliberate decision made after of the systems causes pain points – for careful analysis. This is not the same as instance, because of poor user experience ignoring an issue; it is weighing the risks, design, long response times or a lack communicating the recommendation of mobile versions to support business (and potential repercussions) to key when and where it actually occurs. Both stakeholders and then deciding to focus on analytical and transactional solutions can other priorities. 3 Tech Trends 2015: The fusion of business and IT Beyond technology institutionally “doing no harm” while also raising its game to help drive innovation For any of the techniques described and growth. Adoption of DevOps,4 agile above, the technology implications are and industrialised approaches to fostering only part of the renaissance of the core. innovation can help. But just as essential is Business processes need to evolve in line the alignment to broader business objectives with