By: Neel Vartikar, AVP and Co-Founder - Cuelogic - An LTIMindtree Company

Have you been thinking about how can we modernize legacy products through sustenance engineering? Is product sustenance tough with legacy systems? Read the insights from our sustenance-engineering expert here.

Legacy systems are the bane of the modern tech world. Yet, even after running their course, these products continue to foster support in an industry where everything seems destined for obsolescence. A lack of built-in adaptability is the number one reason why product sustenance is tough with legacy systems. Add to this a solid customer base insistent on maintaining continuity, and you have a product with no hope of updating to the modern speed, functionality, and form factor without a complete overhaul.

Importance of an integrated technology-operating model

To break silos and leave legacy systems behind, the first step is to move towards an integrated technology model that can fall back on rich data sets to breathe, survive, and thrive.

The goal is to move from a digital factory model to a digital integration safe house. For instance, the former might translate to teams working with a scalable digital model and repeatable delivery models. Teams have a single delivery view across all digital channels in a digitally integrated model. This is the first step toward maturity while leaving behind legacy footprints.

The great breakout: How to leave legacy applications behind?

An integrated operating model creates the necessary foundation to break free from the shackles of legacy applications. So, let’s dive deeper and understand the roadmap that will help you achieve this:

1. Identifying and eliminating friction to change:More than legacy systems, the real culprit often lurks in the underlying legacy mindset. Over the years, leaders have often tended to continue and scale strategies that have worked in the past, creating a frictional ecosystem that resists change. To combat this with the necessary buy-in, the first step is to differentiate between critical influencers and impediments to change. Then, identifying the essential friction will allow teams to minimize and eliminate legacy mindsets as they scale.
2. Understanding the customers:To successfully transform your existing legacy infrastructure, you need to understand your intrinsic organization ‘needs’ and extrinsic customer ‘wants.’ To understand your customers better, you must include them in the transformation process. This will allow your teams to stay adaptive, competitive, and relevant as you modernize your legacy product lines. Allocate sufficient time and budget to capture necessary customer data sets and make well-informed decisions about their future needs. Eliminating sentiment and guesswork from the decision-making process will help you create a competitive and relevant product.
3. Treating data as the most critical asset: You now have all the pieces in place to move forward. Now is the time to revisit your digital transformation plans and execute them. This process has two key aspects: creating a data-first culture and instituting a data governance program. Data first means that all teams across business functions will rely on data sets to drive decisions. Data governance ensures that all teams adhere to a common set of standards, tools, and processes as they work with data to drive decision-making. Without these, you run the risk of creating silos, resulting in a lack of communication across teams and loss of critical data.
4. Undertaking strategic elimination—not working on too many things at once:The best way to do more is to do less. Working on too many strategic initiatives will only wane the effects of each of them, never really impacting your bottom line. Instead, by pausing or stopping a few projects, you can divert the funds to transform some of those. You can do so by:

• Prioritizing the existing strategic programs
• Identifying and stopping/pausing non-strategic or short-term initiatives
• Introducing suitable projects that will add value to your bottom line toward the end of their life cycle

Managing enterprise architecture with intelligent sustenance engineering

Enterprise architecture is the blueprint for developing, building, and operating software at scale. A modern enterprise will have several digital initiatives running concurrently with dependencies and interactions. Successfully managing this requires an enterprise-wide view of software development processes, life cycles, and implementation while preserving interoperability.

This is where product sustenance engineering can be of great help. It permits you to integrate, orchestrate, and monitor the workflow in the software development life cycle, enabling you to understand where all your efforts are headed, why they are important, and when best to undertake them. Here’s how you can establish a product sustenance services model:

1. Eliminating unnecessary dependencies:Begin by freeing R&R teams from dependencies that no longer make sense. The best way to do this is by deploying DevOps models and decoupling applications from legacy platforms. In addition, teams should be empowered to work autonomously with regular inputs from development and operations specialists. This can bring down release times from a few months to even hours.
2. Breaking down silos:IT architectures and developers can no longer work in silos. Siloed working, when paired with a large number of applications that an enterprise is running, can lead to massive inefficiencies. To make development teams more productive, they must work hand in hand with architecture teams. This will help follow the architectural rules of sustenance engineering. Similarly, architecture teams will be able to create better blueprints with the help of development teams.
3. Having a dedicated platform team:To shift to a sustenance engineering system, leadership must draw a line between two key parts of IT architecture—the platform and the business capabilities. Boundaries must be enforced between these two arms via strict oversight and governance processes. This will empower them to create rapid changes to products and processes and drive IT platforms based on the underlying business capabilities.
4. Making it an ongoing process:Leaders must isolate quick-moving architecture parts from bottlenecks or limiting parts and continuously strive to improve every platform. This might warrant a significant transformation in the leadership mindset. Only then will sustenance engineering be ingrained as a sustainable process rather than an IT project.

Conclusion
Sustenance engineering is a new way of thinking about enterprise architecture. It has the potential to transform how you manage your software development life cycle from the ground up. It helps you eliminate unnecessary dependencies, reduce silos, and create an ongoing process for managing your IT architecture at scale.

Which principle do you think will be the most helpful in transforming your current strategy?