Key Tenets of Technology Simplification

A typical Technology Landscape

We have often seen that the technology landscape of any large Organization is quite complex. Many years ago, Organizations started with implementation of many core systems, which over the years became legacy. Over time the technology landscape saw evolutions with technological advancements and innovations.  New business features got added, resulting in adoption of newer technologies, newer products and newer applications. Many times, these changes happened in an ad hoc manner with each business unit or portfolio taking a narrow view and without any organization wide standardization.  Today this has resulted in many large Enterprise IT landscapes having a combination of legacy systems, client server technologies, multiple third-party products, multiple OS with multiple versions and various technologies across the application layers. Such a complex IT landscape leads to issues such as –

• IT landscape carrying end of life / end of support technology leading to technology obsolescence and vulnerability risk
• Lack of standardization in technology use across LOBs and portfolios in an enterprise
• Large dependence on legacy technology
• Increased time to market if any application needs to incorporate new features or existing features need to be enhanced.
• Increased time for analysis phase due to lack of documentation or inventory for the complex IT landscape.
• Many a times there are unused or redundant applications in the landscape, as different users have got different applications developed over time to service the same or similar functionality.

Initiatives to simplify technology landscape

To tackle such issues, many organizations are embarking on the journey of simplifying the technology landscape and getting each application to its right platform. Many technology initiatives like Data Center exit, cloud adoption and application modernization implicitly lead to technology standardization and simplification of the IT landscape. Some organizations explicitly take up simplification and standardization as a technology project in order to be cloud ready or modernization ready. The drivers could range from –

• IT cost reduction
• Risk reduction
• Regulatory compliance
• Legacy platform exit
• Capability transformation

The use cases could range from across all the application layers (front-end, middleware, backend, infrastructure) or be limited to a single layer. Some examples of such projects include OS upgrades, java/.net upgrades, front end modernization, integration modernization, reports migration, batch jobs modernization and DB replatforms.

Project Execution

A technology simplification project typically starts with an assessment to understand the application and technology inventory of the IT landscape and create a roadmap for the transformation.  After the assessment is completed, the execution of the project will commence.  While the exercise may seem more focused on infrastructure and technology components of the IT landscape, it is critical to take an application view and do an application-based planning.  Key factors to consider to ensure success of such programs are –

• Never underestimate the complexity as there will be a mixture of old and new multiple technologies across all the application layers and multiple skills are required for execution.
• Assessment and planning phase is crucial to understand and baseline the as-is landscape and plan the target state in alignment with the technology strategy of the enterprise.
• The application testing effort will form a major portion of the project effort and due consideration has to be given to this during the planning phase.
• Such projects can generally be executed in a factory model with a very high possibility of reuse of tools and scripts.
• It is important to carefully plan and manage the transition state
• Usage of  AI enabled tools to speed up analysis and execution phase

Benefits

Organizations can reap multiple benefits through technology simplification including

• Technical debt reduction
• Cost optimization
• Technology standardization
• Meeting regulatory compliance
• Third party vendor cost reduction
• Adopting modern technologies
• Bringing in agility into the overall project life cycle.

Conclusion

In summary,  IT environments of large organizations often face complexity due to legacy systems, diverse technologies, and lack of standardization, leading to risks and inefficiencies. Technology simplification projects, driven by goals such as cost reduction, risk mitigation, and modernization readiness, involve thorough assessment, application-focused planning and execution to achieve benefits like technical debt reduction, cost optimization and enhanced agility.