Reduce Friction and Boost Productivity with App Modernization

Falling productivity. Workarounds. Client complaints and missed opportunities. System downtime. These are often symptoms of IT friction points rough spots and inefficiencies that cause very real negative business outcomes, such as these recent examples:

• During the COVID crisis, state governments and agencies are scrambling to find programmers who understand their Cobol-based mainframe systems to assist in processing a flood of stimulus aid and unemployment requirements.
• Organizations are puzzled why lift-and-shift legacy applications to the cloud are actually driving up their total cost of ownership (TCO).

Here are some root causes we’ve found for IT friction:

Legacy applications and processes that no longer fully meet objectives. The overall goals and execution of many legacy applications may have outlived their usefulness. Rather than struggling with existing legacy by using patches, fixes, and workarounds, it may be time to consider modernizing or replacing old apps with something that better suits immediate business goals. If the data associated with the legacy application is largely useful, however, it is possible to streamline and boost performance by rewriting the app for cloud delivery, where it can more easily be maintained, modified, and further modernized in the years to come. All data is preserved.

Inadequate integration of apps and sprawl. Application catalogs build steadily over the years at most organizations. Some are forgotten and are rarely used. Others integrate poorly with one another, as users are forced to use workarounds, submit trouble tickets when errors occur, or worse yet, fail without notice, costing time, business, and opportunities. A makeover that reduces sprawl and better integrates applications and services will cut costs and improve outcomes.

Poor interfaces or complex operations. An interface that was useful even a few years ago, may not serve all your needs today. In addition, overly complex operations may be causing user errors or customer and client frustrations. With periodic app optimizations, users and customers are productive and satisfied.

Compliance and security. Not surprisingly, most enterprise system applications do not fully “pass” compliance and security audits. Because systems and processes evolve over time, what was compliant last year, may not be compliant today. And any changes in an environment require security checkups as well. Modernization of apps can help keep the entire catalog “on one page” for compliance and security purposes.

Perhaps the greatest symptom of friction within an organization is shadow IT: users feel forced to go outside mainstream IT to SaaS and other application vendors to get their jobs done. Current systems are not working.

Reduce Friction for Better Business Outcomes

Customers, partners, and employees all expect nearly frictionless IT and business experiences these days. Even the smallest changes can result in greater satisfaction. One of the greatest opportunities that businesses overlook in their cloud delivery, is choice.

Customers now demand choice. They want to decide how and when they interact with organizations and businesses from their local government to multinational business transactions. Mobile? Internet? Device of choice? Voice? If you deliver choice, your systems need seamless integration.

Accelerate Choice and Change through CloudForte^®

At Unisys, we leverage our application modernization skills to help preserve legacy that is useful and modernize and transform friction points for better business outcomes and choice. We can dramatically reduce the time for application assessments by 80% and automate many cloud migrations and application modernizations with a clear path to future changes as your organization evolves.

LeanBiz™ transformation advisory service: Waterfall and command and control business processes slow time to market, increase cost and limit the ability to address competitive threats. Unisys Corporation’s LeanBiz process moves decision making closer to the customer, moves accountability to the teams delivering the solutions and removes unnecessary blocks to deliver solutions to the customer faster.

Legacy Application cloud native modernization: By avoiding a “big bang” rewrite, Unisys Corporation solutions offer the customer a proven way to modernize their application using best practices that take advantage of cloud technologies that provide elastic scale, and shorten time to market. The business’s agility increases as the new solution accelerates time to market and allows them to focus on their challenges instead of their technology.

Smart Apps and Streamlined Processes: Smart apps can take repetitive and unnecessary steps out of operations and streamline processes. Streamlined processes in turn increase productivity and reduce costs. Meanwhile, customers and users receive a more frictionless and satisfying experience.

Testing as a service: The earlier defects are found in the development process, the quicker and less costly they are to fix. By implementing a comprehensive automated testing solution that combines unit testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing, customers can accelerate delivery while maintain high quality and reduce overall cost of maintaining their software.

CloudForte^® DevSecOps automation: Security risks are different in the cloud. By automating software deployment, customers ensure consistent and repeatable deployments that limit the risks of introducing security vulnerabilities, allow for deployments to be rolled back safely and have the confidence to deploy anytime.

Using these acceleration methods, organizations that need to modernize legacy applications can break free of outdated systems without a complete, costly, overall. And pave the way for a frictionless future.