Modernize Your Applications for State and Provincial Government Organizations
Maximize public value by strategically managing your application roadmap.
- Application modernization is essential to stay efficient and effective in today’s digital environment, to holistically serve the needs of your community. There are significant challenges for State and Provincial governments in balancing the needs of multiple key stakeholder groups; including citizens, staff, and the overall organization. Keeping each sufficiently satisfied is a balancing act.
- Your application portfolio cannot sufficiently support the flexibility and efficiency the business needs because of legacy challenges.
- Your teams do not have a framework to illustrate, communicate, and justify the modernization effort and organizational changes in a language your stakeholders understand.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Build your digital applications around continuous modernization. End-user needs, technology, business direction, and regulations change rapidly in today’s competitive and fast-paced environment. State and Provincial organizations may not have the freedom to act with agility, and modernization failure is not an option, so as to maintain the public trust and operate with fiscal responsibility. Build a platform for continuous modernization into the center of your digital application vision, and not a patchwork of applications, to keep up with evolving business, end-user, and IT needs.
- Application modernization is organizational change management. If you build and modernize it, they may not come. The crux of successful application modernization is the strategic, well-informed, and onboarded adoption of changes in key business areas, capabilities, and processes. Organizational change management must be front and center so that applications are fit for purpose and are something that end users want and need to use.
- Business-IT collaboration is not optional. Application modernization will not be successful if your lines of business (LOBs) and IT are not working together. IT must empathize with how LOBs operate and proactively support the underlying operational systems. LOBs must be accountable for all products leveraging modern technologies and be able to rationalize the technical feasibility of their digital application vision.
Impact and Result
- Establish the digital application vision. Gain a grounded understanding of the digital application construct and prioritize these attributes against your digital business goals.
- Define your modernization approach. Obtain a thorough view of your business and technical complexities, risks, and impacts. Employ the right modernization techniques based on your organization’s change tolerance.
- Build your roadmap. Clarify the organizational changes needed to support modernization and adoption of your digital applications.
Modernize Your Applications for State and Provincial Government Organizations
Maximize public value by strategically managing your application roadmap.
Analyst Perspective
Focus modernization on organizational value delivery
Today’s state and provincial organizations have an unenviable task to maintain modern applications that their stakeholders, staff, and citizens have come to expect, against the myriad of constraints they must deal with.
The work of modernizing is the same in private industries and organizations, but the pressures, constraints, and strategy around modernizing is different. Addressing the unique challenges, priorities, and strengths of public organizations, balanced against the forces of needing to modernize, managing a limited budget, determining priorities, and being ready for the future, while maintaining the public trust, can be daunting.
Modernization is a continuous need, and organizations are expected to deliver good value and service to their communities. Focus modernization on the capabilities and functions that matter to the business to strengthen the case for further modernization efforts and build trust with all stakeholders. The goal is to deliver changes that will benefit the community you serve, balanced against the needs of the organization, operating in a fiscally responsible way, to maintain the public trust.
Vincent Mirabelli
Principal Research Director
Application Delivery and Application Management
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your ChallengeApplication modernization is essential to stay efficient and effective in today’s digital environment to holistically serve the needs of your community. There are significant challenges for state and provincial governments in balancing the needs of multiple key stakeholder groups including citizens, staff, and the overall organization. Keeping each sufficiently satisfied is a balancing act. Your application portfolio cannot sufficiently support the flexibility and efficiency the business needs because of legacy challenges. Your teams do not have a framework to illustrate, communicate, and justify the modernization effort and organizational changes in a language your stakeholders understand. |
Common ObstaclesLegacy applications are cemented in organizational culture, and some users are unwilling to change, even if your community demands it. The community you serve have jobs to be done. If those jobs are made easier, they will be happy. If they aren’t getting support and ease of use, the result is an administrative nightmare for other service channels and the organization as a whole. Without a clear focus on organizational needs, decisions about what and how to modernize can become complicated. Politics and bureaucracy will creep into the decision-making process and will generate plans that are not beneficial to all stakeholders. Competing and conflicting priorities may undermine modernization value by focusing on approaches that would benefit only one line of business rather than the entire organization. Significant effort is required to bring true modernization change to the organization. |
Info-Tech’s ApproachEstablish the digital application vision. Gain a grounded understanding of the digital application construct and prioritize these attributes against your digital business goals. Define your modernization approach. Obtain a thorough view of your business and technical complexities, risks, and impacts. Employ the right modernization techniques based on your organization’s change tolerance. Build your roadmap. Clarify the organizational changes needed to support modernization and adoption of your digital applications. |
Insight Summary
Build your digital applications around continuous modernization. End-user needs, technology, business direction, and regulations change rapidly in today’s competitive and fast-paced environment. State and provincial organizations may not have the freedom to act with agility, and modernization failure is not an option to maintain the public trust and operate with fiscal responsibility. Build a platform for continuous modernization into the center of your digital application vision, not a patchwork of applications, to keep up with evolving business, end-user, and IT needs.
Application modernization is organizational change management. If you build and modernize it, they may not come. The crux of successful application modernization is the strategic, well-informed, and onboarded adoption of changes in key business areas, capabilities, and processes. Organizational change management must be front and center so that applications are fit for purpose and are something that end users want and need to use.
Business-IT collaboration is not optional. Application modernization will not be successful if your lines of business (LOBs) and IT are not working together. IT must empathize with how LOBs operate and proactively support the underlying operational systems. LOBs must be accountable for all products leveraging modern technologies and be able to rationalize the technical feasibility of their digital application vision.
Understand the digital umbrella
“Going digital” is much more than strategy and a few new apps.
It requires a complete reinvention of how business and IT operate: integrated teams that deliver their products and services to their customers preferentially through technology.
Your digital transformation begins with a spark
Digital strategy
The organizational vision and approach to transforming and incorporating digital services and technologies into your critical business capabilities and IT operations to enhance value delivery.
Application rationalization
A review of your application portfolio identifying applications that are redundant, don’t support your business capabilities, and are unnecessarily costly.
Business request
Individual or department request for the selection and implementation of new or enhanced tools and technologies to optimize productivity or explore new value opportunities.
Application management
Critical system changes are needed to fix the root cause of known system defects and to proactively mitigate issues that risk business continuity.
IT optimization
Streamlining and automating manual, legacy, and error-prone IT delivery and operational practices with digital and automation tools and technologies.
Digital applications are the foundations of your digital business model
What are digital applications?
A digital application is broadly defined as an application software that is accessible through multiple form factors to perform useful tasks. However, the industry has grown to understand that digital applications are more than that.
The growing influence of and dependency on modern technologies shifted the way organizations operate due to technology’s ability to increase efficiency and effectiveness of services. Many government organizations are building their business models on top of a strong digital application foundation.
Lead with a digital strategy.
Digital applications can give you the opportunity to reap many business and IT benefits. However, organizations often struggle to come to a consensus on a digital application vision and how it can specifically meet their digital business goals.
Get stakeholders on the same page about digital applications with a digital strategy using Info-Tech’s Define Your Digital Business Strategy blueprint.
Applications are viewed as strategic organizational assets.
69% of respondents have or are considering an active application modernization strategy
Source: 2022 State CIO Application Modernization Report
But they are not widely viewed as effective.
64% of respondents continue to use manual processes to address modernization challenges.
Source: “Modernization in State and Local Government”. Govloop.com
Legacy applications challenge your digital business goals
Compliance
Changes in laws and regulations or in industry standards and frameworks can render your technology incompatible with third-party services and risk lawsuits and fines.
Vendor Viability
Vendors supporting your technology’s development and operations may decide to change their product or service’s direction, thus contradicting your business strategy, vendor agreement, and business continuity plan.
Resource Availability
Key resources are unavailable or unaffordable to support the current and future operations, maintenance, and enhancements of your technology.
Legacy applications are no longer suitable for current and future IT and business operations.
- They can be based on outdated technologies, operating in an obsolete format or on an unsupported system.
- They can have ongoing maintenance costs that outweigh the benefits.
- Legacy applications often impede business growth opportunities and consume scarce IT budgets, which could be used for new development.
- However, technology is only one of several critical factors that you must overcome.
Technology is part of the equation for state and provincial organizations
The community’s use of digital services and their expectations of those services have been transformed. The aim is social, economic, and environmental prosperity, and less about technological evolution or revolution.
Modernization requires overcoming fundamental challenges
Legacy and Lore
Some stakeholders may not be willing to change due to the familiarity and traditions of key business practices.
Bureaucracy and Politics
Competing and conflicting priorities for the maturity of strategic applications undermine your modernization.
Process Inefficiencies
Business operations are burdened by wasteful activities. Digital applications are only as valuable as the processes they support.
No Quality Standards
The performance and support of your digital applications are hampered due to unmanageable technical debt.
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Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- Michael Martino, Executive Director, Customer Experience and Digital Programs, Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (Ontario)
- Kurt McDowell, Director, Ohio Legislative Information Systems
- Mike Vanhook, IT Business Solutions Manager, Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs
- 3 anonymous contributors