In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, businesses must keep up with ever-changing customer demands and stay ahead of the competition. Meeting and exceeding customer expectations requires that the company’s IT and application landscape be nimble and highly adaptable to change. For example, let’s consider the case of a small savings bank that is targeting 2X growth, and some of the ways in which it can achieve that is by:
- Increasing the sales of products that deliver high profitability
- Reduce losses from under-performing assets & products
While there are obviously several other ways to grow the business, the 2 examples can help us get a glimpse into the role of enterprise applications in making business strategies successful. The above strategies require that the bank be able to:
- Analyze its existing sales and product data to identify which assets/ products are not performing well, and which ones are the most profitable
- Add a product recommendation engine to the banking platform, for alerting the bank staff to pitch the appropriate & profitable product during customer interactions
In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, businesses must keep up with ever-changing customer demands and stay ahead of the competition. Meeting and exceeding customer expectations requires that the company’s IT and application landscape be nimble and highly adaptable to change. For example, let’s consider the case of a small savings bank that is targeting 2X growth, and some of the ways in which it can achieve that is by:
But modernization has given rise to a whole new set of problems, and recent surveys have revealed that over 50% of modernization projects fail.
There is also a very evident shortage of skills – the world does not have enough skilled programmers to meet this massive requirement for modernization as well as the development of new applications. In a 2022 survey by Kyndryl, 42% of the respondents said that their organization does not have the perfect systems for hiring and retaining people with the right skill sets, while 32% of respondents agreed that they find it hard to retain tech talent. When we combine this with the datum that 29% of respondents agree that IT employees spend far too much time in keeping daily operations running and are unable to focus on strategic tasks, it all creates a picture that companies are having a hard time developing high quality enterprise applications within planned timeframes, and its mainly due to manpower problems.
Some of the other common problems that companies face in development and modernization projects are:
- Cost overruns due to the unplanned changes in the scope of projects.
- Unplanned iterations in UI/ workflows/ business logic.
- Disruption in the staff’s day-to-day productivity, or downtime of critical systems.
- Inability to integrate with legacy systems.
- Unrealistic timelines, or incorrect estimation of time required for development.
In the next post, we shall look at an upcoming and promising methodology that helps address these problems, and also significantly accelerates application modernization.