Ironically, the biggest impediment to Enterprise Digital Transformation is not the lack of resources familiar with modern technology and platforms. Instead, the opposite is true…the true barrier is the lack of application developers on legacy platforms.
For the past few years, the Enterprise market has focused IT spending on deploying innovative, strategic technologies for customer-facing applications. Since the legacy systems weren’t broken and typically ran the “behind the scenes” mission critical business functions, IT leaders chose to ignore them. Instead, they chose to use sophisticated, alluring front end applications to enhance the company brand and effectiveness thus reducing the risk and disruption of upgrading their ERP systems.
This “kick the can down the road” approach resulted in the abolition of new investment in legacy applications. This drove legacy developers to abandon legacy platforms in search of the promise of challenging and stimulating endeavors. Some developers changed careers entirely while others retired.
Unintended Consequences
This unpredictable result has created enormous technical debt and a vast chasm between modern technologies and legacy systems. For organizations that base their success -- their very existence -- on their ability to capitalize on information technology and to do “more with less” this is extremely challenging. Today’s rate of acceleration in the change of business and technical innovation only exacerbates the problem.
Gartner predicts that every dollar invested in digital business innovation through the end of 2020 will require enterprises to spend at least three times that to continuously modernize their legacy application portfolio. Yet where will Enterprise customers find the legacy developers required to modernize their legacy application portfolio? In addition, how much longer will the scarce resources be available?
Contact ETS for Help
Enterprise Transformation Specialists provides you with highly skilled application developers to immediately address your critical resource shortage and to tackle your immense technical debt. We focus on business value as the primary driver of IT spending and adopt the philosophy of continuous maintenance, upgrades and improvements of your IT systems. The result we deliver is a cost-effective, long-term approach for digital transformation. Our specialists provide a bridge to transformation while preserving your valuable corporate legacy application software.