I was looking at the Consider the Source blog entry titled The Optimus Primes of Outsourcing. It made a good point about how different organizations look at advancing into the future. Some are transformational while others like bold new projects. In a world where outsourcing is becoming a common way of integration and modernization for organizations. It is an alternative for easing into change by pulling in experts. There are skills and models that can be brought to modernization situations to help lower risk. Organizations that do these activities more than once will have best practices and repeatable processes.
The imperative for enterprise modernization is simple: It comes down to common-sense economics. Familiar legacy systems have been the foundation for many businesses for decades, so it's easy to ignore the compelling economics of the non-proprietary alternatives. The complexities of that success will require periodic weeding for maximum value harvest.
I find it interesting that organizations can view infrastructure modernization separately from application modernization. From my perspective there will always be elements of both for every improvement. I have not quite included business modernization, but will give in that any effort that has real business impact will need to incorporate those aspects as well.
There is no one best way to modernize. The process begins with a current situation assessment and review of the existing applications and hardware portfolio with an eye toward long-term goals and thinking about value delivered and what can be migrated and what should be migrated. Your partners in modernization should be able to attune themselves to your business and be open to finding a solution that matches your needs. While the migrations that are core to modernization were once viewed as risk-prone, as the improvement process becomes rigorous and reliable it should be less risky (the current production is running on that code after all).That’s assuming that the foundational business rules have not changed and can be harvested effectively from the existing code.
