5 Steps to App Modernization

What is App Modernization?  

App modernization is the process of taking older, legacy applications and updating their platform architecture to take advantage of modern systems and features.  

A great example of app modernization is adding embedded analytics to your application. Embedded analytics help add value to your applications by embedding real-time reporting, interactive data visualization and advanced analytics more quickly than building them yourself. Make complex information comprehensible by presenting it visually, giving users insights to help them drive smarter, faster decisions.   

The Importance of Good Customer Experience  

When we are talking about application modernization it is essential that we start with the importance of customer experience and user experience. Over the last few years, these concepts have been molded together to the point of having the same outcome. These are two of the most important areas to keep in mind when building your application.  

So, what benefits do you get from focusing on customer and user experience?  

1. Increased Sales  

2. Increased Market Penetration  

3. Increased Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty  

4. Increased Positive Reviews  

So how does customer experience and app modernization tie together?  

App Modernization Benefits  

Although legacy applications – software that is outdated – might still work and serve a purpose, by not modernizing you are hurting your software.

Modernization makes things memorable.  

Your applications need to help your end users understand their data faster, easier and in more meaningful ways. Data visualizations help make data more consumable and help users make decisions and tell a more compelling story. After all, as humas we are programmed to think visually:  

• 65% of people are visual learners 
• We process images 60,000 times faster than text  
• It takes 13 milliseconds to recognize an image 

This puts heavy emphasis on the customer experience when providing embedded analytics to your end users.  

Just think about task switching. When you can provide users with in-context analytics that enable your user to make immediate decisions that are based on the information and screen they are working on at the moment, you are increasing their satisfaction tremendously. So, just some of the benefits you get with app modernization are:  

• Better customer experience  
• New revenue streams  
• Agile application software 
  
  

5 Steps to App Modernization  

So far we’ve described the positive impact of modernizing your applications, but how can you take action? We narrowed it down to 5 easy steps!

1. Know Your Goals: Make sure you are starting your journey with clearly defined business outcomes. You can easily identify these by asking yourself these questions:

• Is this a value-add to my customers?​ 

• Will this provide me with a new revenue stream?​ 

• Will this help prevent customers from fleeing to new, modern competitors?​ 

• Is this consistent with our goals to push a data-first/data-democratization culture change?​ 

• Will this help us promote a self-service analytics capability, or simply the sharing of data? 

2. Know Your Audience: Make sure you fully understand your target audience so that you know how to align these customer targets back to your goals and the types of functionality you need to provide. Ask yourself the following questions. Are you:  

• Targeting current users in an existing app​? 

• Targeting new users in an existing app​? 

• Targeting new or existing users in an off-shoot of you existing app? 

These answers will make a difference in the UX choices and how you approach the modernization.   

3. Know Your UX Strategy: It is disruptive to end users when the analytics in an application do not look like they belong to the application. Instead, it seems like they were simply thrown together without carefully considering the experience. This is why you want to:

• Deliver a “built-in” experience, not a “bolt-on” experience​ 

• Make sure that all UX elements (theming & styling, roundness vs. squareness, dialogs) match your brand experience​ 

4. Know Your Data: Having a full understanding for the data you require for your dashboards will make the app modernization much smoother.  Ensure you have done an inventory of data sources and have planned what you are going to give users access to.​ 

• On-Prem or Cloud-Based?​ 

• Do you need to access data from SaaS products?​  

• Does your data need orchestration/transformation?​ 

5. Know Your Services:If you’ve started a modernization program, you may have started down the path of transforming your app to a service-based approach.  If not, you will need to architect the APIs, Security and Data Access to expose what you need via RESTful APIs and services.​ 

• Do you have API’s?​ 

• Are your services secure?​ 

• Is your architecture loosely coupled?​ 

• Do you require VPN to access internal data?  

For a more indepth look at how to modernize your apps along with a live demo, watch our webinar, 5 Steps to App Modernization.