Last week, Asperitas announced the results of a survey on enterprise application modernization. A key takeaway from the study is that despite broad agreement on the value of application modernization, many enterprise IT executives are struggling with the process. To better understand their latest thinking, devmio asked Derek Ashmore of Asperitas a few questions:

devmio: At a high level, what is application modernization, and why has it become increasingly important to large and midsize enterprises?

Derek Ashmore: Good question. There are several reasons, but the largest is increasing competitive advantage for the enterprise. The increased speed to market that comes with modernization is essential. By "speed to market" I really mean the speed at which an organization can introduce new features to users. Organizations use this to gain competitive advantage over their competition. In the digital world, application software is increasingly a source of business advantage.

Additionally, consuming the public cloud is a part of most application modernization efforts. The cloud offers the firm dynamic scaling abilities. That is, the application footprint can grow and shrink along with the organization's user base. This provides improved availability. Moreover, with the cloud, users often get performance improvements as the applications are accessible wherever the users are. Financially, as the cloud transfers capital expense to operational expense, there can be financial benefits as well.

Another reason is that applications using modern technologies are more likely to attract top IT talent. Good IT professionals like to work on current technologies and aren't satisfied with legacy tools.

The cloud offers the firm dynamic scaling abilities.

devmio: Given its growing importance, what steps are companies taking to address application modernization? And what challenges are they facing along the way?

Derek Ashmore: Most companies start application modernization by concentrating on technology change to begin with. They concentrate on migrating their applications to the cloud and secondarily entertain introducing microservices, containerization, and possibly Kubernetes.

They find out that with just these technology changes, they don't experience many of the competitive advantages mentioned above. Application modernization is really a paradigm shift in how firms manage application changes such as introducing new features. Successful modernization efforts have much shorter lead times for feature enhancements and are able to increase the rate at which new features are made available for use in production. These benefits don't automatically come with just technology changes.

The paradigm shift is often the hardest challenge for firms to tackle. Developers need to adopt different tactics such as automated testing and learn to manage their environments through code instead of managing manually. Managers need to learn to control less through manually enforced policies and approvals and enforce more through implementing automated guardrails, which all cloud vendors support.

Another challenge is that many legacy applications do not have automated test harnesses. As an application is transformed, a test harness can provide early alert to defects introduced in the modernization effort. By defect, I mean inadvertently introducing bugs that prevent end users from conducting business. In modernization efforts we lead, establishing a test harness so that we can make changes to the application safely is the first order of business.

Successful modernization efforts have much shorter lead times for feature enhancements and are able to increase the rate at which new features are made available for use in production.

devmio: What are the short and long-term advantages to going through the Application Modernization process? And which applications should be prioritized?

Derek Ashmore: As the largest benefit is increased competitive advantage, applications that offer the largest strategic advantage in the marketplace should be prioritized. Concentrating on applications that are less competitive and more back-office will not yield the same amount of benefit.

Over time the advantages companies experience through modernization starts slow and increases over time. Kind of like the first half of a bell curve. In other words, in the short-term, benefits may seem slow to arrive. Most of the benefits will be experienced in the mid to long term.

In the short term, benefits will begin appearing in the form of catching more defects earlier before production release. As the automated test harness gets more comprehensive, then the team can start deploying change at a faster pace as they can rely on the test automation. Getting an application to the point where it can leverage the cloud's dynamic scaling capabilities generally takes more time; I consider this more of a long-term benefit.

If you treat the transformation as a mere technology change, you won't get the competitive benefits you seek from the effort.

devmio: What are some tips you can share for IT leaders considering application modernization? And what are some pitfalls to avoid?

Derek Ashmore: I advise clients to start measuring their change management process with DORA metrics. That way they can gauge progress of the modernization effort over time. That said, be careful how you use metrics. If developers feel that you're using them for performance reviews, they will seek ways to game the system and contaminate your measurements. The objective of modernization is to improve your ability to introduce new features more quickly and more safely.

IT leaders should also recognize what application modernization is not. It's not just a technology change with new buzz words. If you treat the transformation as a mere technology change, you won't get the competitive benefits you seek from the effort. Microservices might be beneficial for your application but are not required. The same can be said for Kubernetes or containerization. The objective is improving the development process.

Lastly, declare war on manual business processes and approvals. Shift your thinking to implement policies through automated guardrails, which all cloud vendors support these days. Any review, process or approval that is manual adds to the lead time and negatively impacts your DORA metrics.