The cost of doing nothing — Application Modernisation

Version 1’s James Maguire, a Software Developer, outlines the risks of not updating your critical business applications.

I have been working on Software Development projects for the last 12 years and as each project ends, I move on to the next project without experiencing what happens next in terms of the next steps in the application lifecycle. I have recently had some experience in dealing with applications that have been built 15+ years ago and are still providing critical business processes.

This has got me thinking; is this a sign that the original implementation was highly successful and this has allowed the applications to remain unchanged and provided at a low ongoing cost or is this hiding costs in terms of the lost opportunity for these applications to evolve with the business and with new technology opportunities? In my opinion, it is the latter.

For most businesses, the cost of building and maintaining their application estate is a considerable undertaking. Most businesses start their application journey with several business processes that need to be supported to optimise the running of their core business. The building of this application suite can take years and a sizable budget.

Once the applications are completed and underpinning the business, these applications need to be maintained by an application support team. If these applications have been well built and align correctly with the business this can be a relatively small operation. The temptation at this point is to consider the applications as complete and to keep them in long term support, without any modernisation, for as long as possible until some business event causes these applications to require replacement. I am now going to explore the unseen costs of this “doing nothing approach” approach vs a continuous improvement approach.

Let us start by defining what characteristics of the application estate are important:

· Alignment with business processes

· Security

· Cost of ownership

· Usability

We assume that when the application build is completed and if it has been built correctly all the above characteristics will be in an optimal or close to optimal state at the time of release. Now let us look at the cost of doing nothing in each of these areas.

Business Process Alignment

Business processes evolve over time and if the application does not adapt accordingly, inefficiencies are introduced as the business is required to interact with sub-optimal processes. As available technology advances, the overhead of continuing with these applications increases and this creates a competitive disadvantage for the business. Inaction in this area is a backwards step affecting the efficiency of your business.

Security

The security of the application also needs constant attention. Underlying operating systems need to be patched and they will also become end of life at some point. The versions of .NET or Java would need to be upgraded over time. These events can come with large overheads and deliver very little in value to the business other than aligning to security best practice. Although this is important, business users will not see the business value being achieved from the effort and therefore will be reluctant to invest, leaving the application estate vulnerable from a security perspective. Further information on the impact can be found here from the UK government’s National Cyber Security Team.

Cost of ownership

The initial maintenance costs of a stable application will be low but over time this will increase as technical resources move on and knowledge is lost, making support slow and challenging. It will become problematic to attract qualified people to support end of life technologies.

Usability

Any application interface will become dated over time and if the business retains the same people this might not be an issue, but as new users are onboarded, if the application is not aligned to modern design principles the onboarding process will become more complicated.

In summary, the cost of doing nothing can be felt across many areas of IT and business operations. Within a few years each of the characteristics will have degraded and depending on the circumstances this will determine how this affects the business processes underpinned by these applications.

Continuous Development/Delivery Approach

The risks outlined above can be mitigated by continuously developing the application estate. This allows the application to evolve along with the business, tightly aligning with business processes and taking advantage of the latest technology offerings. At the pace that cloud offerings are expanding this will offer opportunities for business advantage and can offer cost savings from on-premise hosting.

The continuous development model shown in the diagram above from Microsoft will allow for opportunities to rearchitect solutions to make use of cloud computing options such as serverless computing, No SQL databases, AI tools and other cloud services. These can provide significant cost savings and these opportunities are the real value of this approach to applications management. It allows your applications to enable the business and to deliver maximum value and efficiency to business processes rather than becoming a blocker.

As part of the continuous development approach, OS and platform upgrades happen organically as the application evolves and are bundled along with changes driven by business value. These upgrades are no longer an event which need to happen due to end of life products or decommissioning which in turn inflict change on the business and are not seen to be providing any value for money.

In conclusion, the continuous development approach certainly looks more costly on paper but the “doing nothing” approach is just pushing the costs into the future and adding costs elsewhere as business processes are no longer optimised.

The first step to changing is Application Modernisation. See https://www.version1.com/blog-app-modernisation-business-benefits/ for more information.