![Picture of Levi Olmstead](https://whatfix.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/levi.jpeg)
Levi Olmstead
Before work messaging applications (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost) went mainstream, distributed teams relied on a combination of email, phone, instant messaging platforms (like Skype), and project management tools such as Basecamp and Asana.
Now, whether you’re a team of <10 or a global enterprise with thousands of employees, you can chat, video conference, and share voice clips, videos, and multiple file formats with co-workers (and even partners across organizations), group conversations by dedicated channels, integrate thousands of third-party applications inside Slack, and automate routine tasks with a visual if-then workflow builder, etc.
Likewise, before SaaS cloud computing solutions like AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, companies had to:
Now, enterprises have modernized legacy applications and their overall IT infrastructure. Modern companies rely on cloud-based SaaS applications that are more efficient, powerful, and scalable, enabling organizations to grow, improve operational efficiency, and empower employees to be more productive.
IT modernization keeps organizations updated with the latest technological advances and drives digital transformation, empowering companies to move faster, remain competitive, reduce IT costs, and respond better to changes in their industry.
In this article, we’ll explore the concept of enterprise IT modernization, share technologies that are driving IT modernization in different areas of your business, and detail best practices for organizations navigating cloud transformation and the challenges that come with it.
IT modernization is an umbrella term that is the sum of efforts organizations invest in upgrading their technology stack to keep pace with innovation and digital transformation. IT modernization is the foundation on which organizations build their digital transformation projects and is critical to achieving their digitalization goals. IT modernization identifies areas of technology opportunity and risks, helping companies to improve business processes, improve operational efficiency, drive employee productivity, provide a more robust customer experience, and innovate their products and solutions – all powered by emerging IT technologies.
While the big-picture goal of IT modernization is to adopt newer, better technology solutions, there are several areas of IT that modernization efforts work on, including:
Application modernization deals mainly with transforming the frontend applications an organization’s end-users employees interact with daily. This includes:
While application modernization is focused on improving the visible layer through which end-users interact with their organization’s technology stack, IT infrastructure modernization deals with updating and improving the core technological components that run in the backend to make the former possible, including:
Network modernization refers to the process of upgrading and optimizing a company’s networking infrastructure to improve performance, security, scalability, and efficiency. This involves updating or replacing outdated hardware, software, and protocols to align with current technological trends and business needs. Modernizing a network typically encompasses several key aspects:
The essence of network modernization is to create a more agile, secure, and adaptable network infrastructure that can efficiently support the organization’s evolving needs, accommodate emerging technologies like IoT and edge computing, and provide a robust foundation for digital transformation initiatives.
Device modernization focuses on ensuring an organization’s staff are empowered with the best hardware (desktop and portable computers, IoT devices, etc.). It also entails:
While every IT modernization initiative will have contextual, unique challenges, there are overarching themes and best practices that will empower CIOs and IT teams to achieve their legacy application and IT modernization goals.
The People, Process, and Technology framework is a digital transformation philosophy that’s based on the idea that your end-users need intelligently designed processes to maximize the impact of technology. The framework includes:
A change management strategy is a plan for overcoming internal resistance and making a smooth transition to new technology. Your change strategy needs to account for:
Include all major department heads and team managers from business units that will be impacted. Also include individual end-user employees most impacted by a change in the modernization planning and release.
Third-party digital transformation consultants and implementation partners are also indispensable for IT modernization projects, even if you have a strong internal engineering function. They can advise on technical issues, create a game plan for your transition, help mitigate unforeseen challenges and design your training and onboarding program.
A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix enables organizations with a no-code platform to analyze end-user behavior and create in-app guidance and support that overcomes areas of technology and digital workflow friction.
With Whatfix’s DAP, analyze your end-user behavior across different types of end-users to map user journeys and identify areas of friction. Use Whatfix’s Visual Editor to create contextual in-app guidance and end-user support, at the moment of friction, to drive technology adoption.
With Whatfix, you can create in-app guidance and support experiences such as:
Software clicks better with Whatfix's digital adoption platform
Enable your employees with in-app guidance, self-help support, process changes alerts, pop-ups for department announcements, and field validations to improve data accuracy.
Test your new setup in a sandbox with a limited beta group of users for user testing before you roll it out to your end-users at large. The goal here is to get unfiltered feedback, tune your setup to your end-users’ needs to fit their day-to-day workflow, identify unforeseen problems and areas of friction, and tweak your infrastructure until it’s ready to go.
After rollout, you need to keep tabs on how your end-users interact with your newly deployed IT resource, observe the challenges they encounter, and overall, keep trying to discover ways to simplify their user experience.
An end-user behavioral tool (like Whatfix Analyze) can keep you track of which pages your users visit, the features and UI components they interact with, and friction areas and issues they experience (e.g., rage clicks, unresponsive buttons, dead form fields, etc.) so you can understand how to optimize user flows better and remove friction from the user experience.
With Whatfix, you can address UX-related issues by launching new in-app guidance and moment-of-need support content inside your applications to overcome these areas of friction. This enables end-users to maximize their productivity powered by new technology and software applications, driving ROI from your IT modernization projects.
The most significant obstacle IT challenges modernization projects face is inertia—after all, you’re trying to shake up, redesign, or, in many cases, completely replace the technology infrastructure your workforce is already used to.
So, you’ll encounter hesitance from the C Suite (“your idea is good but we can’t commit $1.2 million just yet”), stakeholders who’re comfortable with your existing setup and are wary of changes, customers and business partners who prefer the status quo, and end-users who will need to be coached to get up to speed.
That culture of resistance to change can manifest in several ways such as:
While it’s essential to choose the appropriate IT stack, assemble a dream team, and secure enough budget to modernize whatever part of your tech infrastructure you want to transform, the real work begins after your setup is done.
That’s when you need to create engaging experiences designed to coach your end-users through UI flows, publish self-help content your audience can access at their own pace, and use interactive job aids to provide in-app guidance until your internal users master how the IT tools in question work, whether it’s Salesforce’s CRM, SAP, Datadog, ServiceNow, or any combination of enterprise software packages designed to automate work at scale.
That’s where Whatfix comes in: our product is a digital adoption platform designed to help enterprises coach their in-house users through enterprise software. Using Whatfix’s suite of product adoption tools, you can:
Al without writing a line of code. At the core of our product is a WYSIWYG editor that enables non-technical users to design interactive teaching experiences from a drag-and-drop interface.
Request a demo to learn how Whatfix can help you unlock the value of your enterprise software as you transform your IT stack.
Thank you for subscribing!