Updating processes and adopting new technology is an issue that needs to be addressed by most businesses. Before that decision is made, however, you need to identify what you hope to gain out of modernization.
Over the course of my career I’ve spoken with many customers and there’s a theme that surfaces time and again – the aspiration for their business applications to be flexible and scalable while helping to simplify and automate their processes.
Yes, this aspiration centers on efficiency gains but, more importantly, it’s about securing business outcomes that translate into the ability to achieve a real return on investment. What it boils down to is enabling businesses to accelerate the time to value.
Equally, I hear many customers talk about the complexity of their existing application portfolio. Many have invested significant time and capital into building out those portfolios but that has now resulted in heavily configured and customized applications. They’re suddenly faced with significant complexity when it’s time to think about a modernization strategy and roadmap.
Since 2006, Oracle has been in Inoapps’ DNA and we have defined an accompanying set of best practices around the application modernization challenge.
In a series of articles, I’ll be joined by my Inoapps colleagues as we discuss the challenges, the opportunities and how to successfully navigate the Oracle Cloud Applications modernization journey. These are the themes we’ll be unpacking:
…but don’t be a slave to the end state. Any modernization journey takes time. While it’s important to keep the end state in sight, accept that business priorities change, regulatory, legal and fiscal requirements evolve and your modernization journey has to be flexible so it can adapt to ever-changing conditions.
It’s critical to break down the modernization journey into incremental but meaningful steps aligned to your business architecture, which offers ROI at each stage. For this, you need an approach that allows incremental evolution with measurable outcomes at each milestone.
The importance of people
The importance of people and the role they play in the success of any modernization effort is too often underestimated.
When moving to cloud solutions and away from configured and customized applications, the philosophy of ‘adopt not adapt’ comes into play. Such a perspective offers the ability to align to Oracle modern best practices. While this chance to standardize is very attractive at a business level, it’s critically important to recognize the change management and training that’s needed to ensure high adoption rates so that everyone is getting the maximum benefit from the new solutions.
The evolution of a roadmap
The go-live of a cloud applications implementation is just the beginning. Once the foundational capability is in place, the second step of incremental evolution can begin. This iterative process, achieved through sprint-based continual enhancement, is where your business capability evolution truly begins.
Where you take your application will depend on your business, your goals and changing market circumstances. Never forget your roadmap is an invaluable guide to your journey.
Driving continuous improvement
With Oracle Cloud Applications, we’re in a different world where ‘fix on fail’ is no longer enough when it comes to support. In traditional IT, the approach was valid but in today’s world, value is realized through continual improvement and adoption. ‘Keeping current’ is now mandatory for business and systems integrity, and active management of your environment is essential for efficient utilization of your software assets.
Your optimal path now involves balancing three domains to maintain a close link between changing business demands, business system capability needs and supporting those capabilities.
To help businesses with these challenges, an accelerated time-to-value implementation approach that can leverage years of previous implementation experience, such as systems like Inoapps Evolve, can allow customers to implement scalable solutions for a fraction of the time and cost.
Importantly, with systems designed specifically for quick deployment, customers need to ensure it also adheres to all statutory or security requirements, offers scalable solutions that can grow and evolve and, for Oracle users, is a gateway into standard Oracle functionality.
Keep your eyes on this space for part two…
