2023 Survey Landing Page

The State of Application Modernization 2023: Insights into IT Teams’ Strategies and Preparedness

New findings on enterprise IT teams’ current application modernization priorities, preparedness, and access to the latest technologies. Reveals some surprising contradictions to common assumptions around modernization priorities and goals, as well as a curious disconnect between perception and reality around overall readiness.

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Key Insights Include:

IT Teams cite boosting employee productivity as the top motivation for application modernization.

This is far ahead of commonly cited reasons for application modernization, such as cloud migration and improving customer experience. However, there is a disconnect when comparing these results to success measures. Improving customer experience and readiness to migrate to the cloud shows up as the top measures of success, indicating that there may be differences in how IT teams think about application modernization priorities versus the rest of the business.

Organizations are more confident about their understanding of legacy applications before starting a modernization project

Confidence drops significantly once the project is underway, likely due to uncovering unexpected challenges and knowledge gaps in the documented understanding of their applications. Many also believe that they can fill those gaps with knowledge from legacy personnel; however, the vast majority of respondents cite challenges retaining and/or hiring legacy programming talent, showing that this confidence may be overstated or misplaced.

Only a small fraction of organizations are taking advantage of commonly desired and available advanced modernization capabilities.

More than half of the respondents would like to automate business rules extraction (BRE), and code transformation. Yet while these and other technologies on their wish lists are available in the current modernization market, only a small group say they have access to them.

Modernization without the need to freeze code is the top requested capability, recognizing that it has both business and financial ramifications.

This is likely because of the need to put policy changes on hold when code is frozen, as application logic cannot be updated.