The first step towards application modernisation is assessing your current application landscape. In that respect, an application modernisation project is not all that different from any other major IT migration or transformation programme. At Sopra Steria, we have exactly what it takes to help you successfully conduct such an assessment.
In a previous blog post I focused and elaborated on the business and monetary value that a digital transformation programme can bring to your organisation. More particularly, I pointed out the clear financial benefits of investing in Smart Application Modernisation (SAM).
SA3M assessment
Starting from a general analysis of what drives your company's return on capital employed (ROCE), including both business and technology drivers, the first concrete step on your application modernisation journey is taking inventory of what you already have. To help you assess that installed application base, we have developed a proven approach and methodology: the Smart Application Modernisation Maturity Model (SA3M). It is the direct result of over forty years of experience in application development and maintenance (ADM). During this time we acquired and built up the appropriate skills and re-usable assets for that particular IT discipline in a wide variety of business environments, processes and technologies.
Through our SA3M approach, we not only support our customers in assessing their application landscape. Ultimately, we also help them define and implement their roadmaps for application modernisation and digital transformation. As the illustration below shows, our SA3M assessment is essentially a five-step process, culminating in the production of a transformation or modernisation roadmap.
After a pre-project framing phase in which we define the objectives and scope of the assessment itself, we move to the first assessment step in which we identify, analyse, and prioritize your business transformation drivers quite some levels deeper. Examples of these drivers are optimized and controlled cost, time to market acceleration, or a business value increase from your applications. We also check how well IT and business are aligned within your organization.
The second step in the process is an analysis of your application portfolio. As an integral part of that analysis, we also do a business capability review of the application portfolio, carry out a risk assessment on your application landscape, as well as an assessment of your applications’ business and IT quality gap. One of the key elements is to establish the current business value you get from your applications in order to set the stage for decisions on what and where to invest or divest in which applications. The assessed risk and quality of applications gives an additional underpinning of that upcoming decision making.
Thirdly, we analyse your application development and maintenance (ADM) processes and set it off against our own SAM maturity model based on market data and own best practices. This process view is an additional step in setting the stage on where to make the move to other ways of working (like a shift or improvement steps to Agile) or to make key process improvements (like Lean IT).
As a fourth step, we analyse your team’s engagement, assessing your entire IT organisation in the process. Along with your IT staff engagement on human resource aspects, open and collaboration culture, we will set the stage for initiatives like a digital academy for training & improvement of skills, how to support and value bottom up innovations and foster collaboration and re-use of assets and/or best practices to a higher level. Collaboration is understandably key here, as is bottom-up innovation.
Finally, we produce a diagnostic report, identify your SAM transformation levers and propose a transformation roadmap for your transformation journey. The key elements of the roadmap are not only set by the results of the assessments, but also by the objectives of the assessment and your transformation drivers. There is a business reason to do all of this, which I addressed in my previous blogpost on drivers and funding of digital transformation.
Next to our SA3M assessment, which is specifically geared towards application modernization, we have also developed a wide array of Discovery & Assessment Services. These have a broader scope, not only collecting business and technical quality data about applications, but also on your infrastructure & cloud platforms and the full enterprise architecture. On top of that, they offer even more in-depth analysis on cloud migration scenarios. You can find out more about them here.
Discovery & Assessment Services
Next to our SA3M assessment, which is specifically geared towards application modernization, we have also developed a wide array of Discovery & Assessment Services. These have a broader scope, not only collecting business and technical quality data about applications, but also on your infrastructure & cloud platforms and the full enterprise architecture. On top of that, they offer even more in-depth analysis on cloud migration scenarios. You can find out more about them here.