In the context of digital transformation, few people would tell you that modernization is a bad thing. And yet stories abound of modernization initiatives that end up going nowhere:
- The IT team that adopts agile methodologies, then sprints in circles with no clear direction.
- The organization that migrates every workload to the cloud without hesitation, then waits for transformation to happen.
- The CIO who implements artificial intelligence (AI) for the primary purpose of … becoming a leader in AI.
This is not an indictment of modernization—in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Modernization is the advancement of an organization’s technology, operations, and processes in service of tangible business outcomes. It’s precisely because modernization is such an effective pathway to both digital and business transformation that it gets easier every day to confuse modernization with transformation itself.
But a pathway is not a purpose. When treated like one, it’s bound to disappoint. To keep your modernization journey from becoming an exercise in futility, your whole organization first needs to set a destination. Before you install a scrum master, migrate an application, or build your first AI model, know precisely what you want to achieve and how you’ll know when you’ve achieved it.
Where Are We Going?
Modernization enables digital transformation, but “digital transformation” can evoke the same sort of ambiguous enthusiasm that puts organizations on the road to nowhere. A near-defamatory combination of overuse and plain misuse has caused some people to give up on the term. Still, thought leaders at the world’s top technology providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), choose a different path, continuously developing, amplifying, and iterating on a more workable definition of digital transformation for themselves and for their customers.
So, before you start modernizing, think hard and holistically about what digital transformation means:
A vision for the future. Start with what your organization couldn’t exist without: the customers or members you serve. What is their journey, where is there friction in it, and how is it changing? Bring business and IT teams together to compare answers, find alignment, and triage those areas of friction.
Maybe a longer-than-average mean time to repair is hurting your customer satisfaction and your maintenance costs as much as your service team’s morale. That’s a multidimensional problem worthy of a multidimensional solution. Turning opportunities like these into business goals with concrete outcomes will help you build a sense of ownership and urgency across your different teams.
A mindset for the future. Turn ambiguous enthusiasm into clear-sighted conviction by answering some difficult questions, chief among them being “What is holding your organization back from pursuing the boldest goals you’ve identified?” Chances are, what’s holding you back has to do with a mindset—the kind that says that digital transformation is about technology and not mindsets, people, or even organizational change.
Twenty years of consulting and 10 years of cloud-first engineering experience tell us a different story, and you need to present it in a way that won’t scare away your stakeholders. This is where purpose—and a little bit of psychology—meets people.
Innovation Horizons. Slalom’s leading strategists think about innovation—a core focus of digital transformation—in three ways, called Innovation Horizons. They have noticed a growing trend in the third horizon: changing the essence of the organization and leveraging capabilities that exist at the company to do something completely new, such as a craft distillery making hand sanitizer. That level of agility is downright disruptive.
It’s notoriously hard to assign actual business value to goals like agility, but when agility makes the difference between surviving and thriving in times of rapid change, it’s worth crunching some numbers (and we can help you with that).
How Do We Get There?
Now let’s talk about modernization. Where to begin? There is organization modernization, process modernization, and technology modernization, to name a few. Within technology modernization, there is data modernization, cloud modernization, application modernization, and more. Within application modernization, there is replatforming or refactoring, if you’re not just rehosting. Deciding which of these to pursue and when to invest in them is enough to immobilize an entire enterprise.
Your defense against analysis paralysis is knowing the business outcomes that you want to see. Use your big vision to think about how your business and operating models might need to change, then evaluate new models alongside experts with deep experience in digital transformation. Once you decide which models are best, determine the key capabilities you’d need to adopt or optimize them and compare these to your organization’s current state. Prioritize which technology to retire, replace, migrate, or modernize based on its relevance to your vision and its complexity relative to your teams’ evolving capabilities. Now you’re ready to modernize.
Modernization in Action
LG CNS had one of the boldest visions we’d seen. The IT service company for LG Group wanted to become the first modern, cloud-native application builder in South Korea. Why? So that it could respond more nimbly to a growing demand for digital transformation across 70 family companies in LG Group and external customers in the open market.
Working together, Slalom and AWS helped LG rethink its business and operating models, build cloud-native engineering architecture, and transition its engineers into agile teams dedicated to solving specific problems, one release at a time. The coolest part: LG’s teams traveled to Seattle to work shoulder to shoulder with teams from Slalom and AWS.
This immersive experience was so effective that it inspired Slalom and AWS to embark on a journey of our own. We started building AWS | Slalom Launch Centers around the globe and staffing them with cloud experts and business strategists from AWS and Slalom. Launch Center teams are dedicated to helping customers propel their organizations into the futures they’re envisioning, and their services are designed to be delivered either in person or virtually.
Is it modernization? Yes, it’s cloud modernization—but it’s always in service of something bigger.
To learn more about AWS | Slalom Launch Centers, visit slalom.com/aws-slalom-launch-centers.
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