What to Consider When Planning Your Next Renovation

When you modernise an application, it should deliver new and improved functionality, work smoothly from day one and always be ready for new enhancements. In short, it should maximise your return on investment. So, before you start, consider these key principles of a successful application renovation.

Future-focused

How will you use your application in five years' time? Maybe you'll employ distributed cloud, artificial intelligence, hyper-personalisation, hyper-automation or other machine learning capabilities. While you may not need them now, any investment should consider them for the future.

Empower people to be their best

Great software lets people work on their terms without the need for shadow IT. It can boost productivity, reduce errors and delays, and improve customer experience. An application renovation enables you to keep the best parts of your old software, while enjoying a far better experience. Chances are your people will be happier, more motivated and have greater work-life balance.  

Integrated experiences

People have become used to great experiences with consumer IT. So, they expect digital interactions at work to be just as easy. These interactions need to be intuitive, engaging and work for everyone - including customers - anywhere and anytime.

Cyber-security

Protecting your intellectual property and customer data from cyber attack is paramount. Any application renovation must carefully manage the security implications of integrating old systems with the new. At Kiandra, security is a top priority and includes penetration tests on the applications we build.

Data

Data is becoming your greatest asset. It helps improve your services through personalisation and decision making, powers machine learning and connects your business. So why not take advantage of untapped sources of data in your business including spreadsheets and shadow IT? Or other sources like sensors, photos, web scraping, social media or drone footage.

Considering what data to collect, and where to store, access, augment and visualise it will impact how you design and build an application.

Data privacy

Today you need to meet fast changing compliance regulations. On one hand, you're under obligation to support customer privacy and rights over their own data. On the other, you may want to submit encrypted data to external sources for analysis. Creating the right balance and ensuring data is used ethically is key. Get it wrong and you will incur hefty fines, damage to reputation and loss of trust. What you need to remember is this: how you use data will impact how an application is built.

Interoperable

Making multiple systems work seamlessly together, sharing data and connecting your business is vital. While you don't want too many systems, those you have should operate efficiently to avoid silos, rework, errors, and slow access to information. Making your systems interoperable can also reduce the load of figuring out what system does what. Application renovations can bring in new functionality, enabling old, disparate systems to talk to each other and deliver more value.

Continuous improvement

An application architecture that enables continuous improvement is vital. We offer frequent build and release cycles, with limited downtime or defects, and plug and play with third party applications. This will allow you to adapt easily to changing business needs or the demands of your users. In fact, renovating an application may help you wean your team off an old environment over time. In turn, this can support a more staged and manageable transition to a modern environment.

Best-of-breed platform

The right platform should support all the goals of an application renovation. You need a platform that is fit for purpose and reliable but will also grow with your needs. More than being easily scalable, it should allow you to update and improve experience and functionality over the long term.