Estyn Edwards' Systems Systems is breaking the best way to keep your technological stack tight.
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Estin Edwards saw too many organizations expand the life of outdated applications until the cost of maintaining them outweighs the advantages.
In the company digital transformation Sunchcard SystemsHe spent more than ten years, working with companies fighting with their own technological stack, because they did not move quickly enough.
“If you want to be innovative, you need to spend this time on modernization.”
Estin Edwards, Punchcard
“Each dollar that you spend on inherited applications service is a dollar that you do not spend on growth,” Edwards said. “Therefore, if you want to be innovative, you need to spend this time on modernization.”
Smarked costs for poor software should not be underestimated.
According to McKinsey Survey Since 2020, the IT director reported that from 10 to 20 percent of the budget of the company, which should be devoted to new products, is sent to solve existing software problems.
In a recent conversation with Betakit, Edwards spoke about six rules that help companies modernize their tools without mitigating their daily activities.
Know when the time has come
According to Edwards, there are three obvious indicators that modernization can no longer be canceled:
- If developers spend more time correcting errors than creating new functions.
- When release cycles are dragged from weeks to months.
- And when the aging systems create noticeable safety gaps.
According to Edwards, all these situations require updating software, since potential business expenses outweigh the update price.
“If you are in modern stack, you can quickly introduce innovations, turn, take risks, knowing that you can recover,” Edwards said. “For most organizations, it is much better to release something, say, weekly and get feedback and use this feedback to control the direction, unlike each month or two months, getting great changes, and then turn the ship.”
It is too early to compare the consequences
Many leaders make a mistake, aiming at the most noisy problem for updating, without thinking about how this will affect other systems.
When Punchard works with the company, they begin with Parting of each application And his dependence in business to understand how the system works as a whole.
According to Edwards, only from there leaders can properly weigh the risks of your current state against the potential business of the update.
The modernization strategy that ignores any part can burn resources without solving a real problem, he added.
Understand your options
As soon as the leaders realize what needs to be changed, the question goes, how far. Edwards said that companies should choose between “Six p: “Rehost, replica, refactor, restoration, retention and repetition.
On one end of the spectrum Re -equipmentThe classic lift and shift that moves the application to the cloud without changing its code. This can quickly reduce risk, but this does not improve the flexibility of the system.
The replica is still one step forward, setting up applications to use the advantages of managed services, such as Azure or AWS. Thanks to better scalability and monitoring, organizations receive a more solid foundation, still avoiding deep changes in the code.
Refactoring, on the other hand, includes significant rewriting. Companies can, for example, break monolithic applications into microservices that can develop independently.
Sometimes, according to Edwards, the best step is to preserve certain applications, as they are in order to concentrate resources in another place or to resign immediately.
The choice among these options depends on the severity of the risks that the organization faces and on the business cost that each application provides.
Rehosting “is exclusively updates and reduces your risk,” said Edwards, noting that refactory or restoration “not only does it, but also changes your ability to innovation and move forward quickly”.
Modernize without mission fields
One of the largest risks of the modernization project is losing the focus. Edwards saw updates when organizations decide to fulfill new requirements in the middle and turn what should be migration into a complete rethinking.
The key to avoiding this, according to him, is to move gradually. “In the end, your time and your liberation cycles should go from months to weeks to days,” he said.
Automate inherent work
And now AI can help take gradual steps faster and less painful, he notes. In the past, many teams should have guessed in business rules built into the code of obsolete systems that practically did not have documentation.
Punchhard often uses AI to look at the system and surface of these rules, maintaining time and avoiding a large number of samples and errors. In a recent project for the public utility company, Punchcard taught user AI to recognize coding patterns in the software, which they updated and sharply reduced the transformation time.
“This is not magic – there were still many problems and friction, and the developers still had to do a lot of work,” Edwards said. “But this took a lot of this inalienable works that people hate.”
Stop paying interest on old technology
According to Edwards, modernization is best understood as investments in a business, not an engineering project.
According to him, technical debt is equivalent to financial debt, because each dollar spent on the support of the old system is lost from growth and innovation.
“This accrues interest,” he added. “If you do not pay for the capital, you will just constantly lag behind.”
“Almost all areas of business these days are somewhat related to technologies,” Edwards added. “Thus, you need to make sure that your technology is at least in the front edge so that you can quickly move and adapt to changes in the market.”
Presented
In Punchcard Systems, we cooperate with large -scale and medium -sized enterprises to create user software that affects the metric that matters. Learn moreField
All photos provided by Sunchcard Systems.
