By modernizing your digital platform, you create more engaging customer experiences, improve operational efficiency, enhance security, and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. You also start to create cohesive technologies — instead of more overhead — ensuring improvements truly amplify business performance.
Before diving into when it’s time to modernize, let’s first ask a fundamental question: What is a digital platform, and how does it impact modern business operations?
A digital platform is a central hub that integrates your business’ software and technology into a single, unified system — allowing all the pieces of your business to work together seamlessly.
This includes:
Customer interactions: Your website, mobile app, online store, social media channels are all part of your digital platform, allowing customers to engage with your brand.
Business operations: Behind the scenes, your platform can manage things like order processing, inventory, customer data, and internal communications.
Data and analytics: A modern digital platform provides valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and overall performance.
Modernizing your digital platforms isn’t just about keeping up – it’s about getting ahead. By building a strong foundation through infrastructure modernization, you open the door to exciting new technologies like Generative AI, Machine Learning, and Advanced Analytics. But where do you begin? The first step is recognizing the need for change.
Adapting rapidly and adopting new approaches to meet organizational and product goals is central to digital platform engineering. If your teams can’t implement new technologies and approaches fast enough, they won’t be able to keep pace with user expectations or competitor innovation. This lag can result in outdated features, slower performance, and a lack of innovation, leading to user dissatisfaction and attrition.
To stay competitive, your digital platforms must empower teams to experiment, iterate, and deploy new solutions quickly. This adaptability does more than meet current user needs; it also anticipates future demands, ensuring sustained user engagement and loyalty.
Expecting a digital platform to solve every unique challenge your teams face is unrealistic, but it should effectively address common issues. If your teams frequently resort to individual solutions for basic problems like caching, load balancing, or scaling, your platform’s existing solutions may be lacking.
This gap can lead to inefficiencies, increased costs, and slowed progress as teams spend valuable time and resources on workarounds instead of focusing on innovation. For a platform to be truly effective, it must evolve to provide robust, scalable solutions for essential tasks, thereby empowering teams to concentrate on higher-level, strategic jobs.
Slower development cycles indicate a lack of support for downstream teams. Long dependency chains and unoptimized toolchains create pipeline bottlenecks, delaying progress and frustrating development teams. These inefficiencies extend cycle times and hinder swift response to market demands and user feedback.
The first step to counter rising development times is to analyze each stage in your development workflow. By examining your development stream, you can identify bottlenecks and take the appropriate steps to ensure your teams can improve your Devops to deliver high-quality products faster and more effectively.
Technical debt comes from code that is bulky, inconsistent, and error-prone. If your teams accumulate technical debt at the same speed they deliver new features, the digital platform is not meeting their needs. While technical debt can accrue for various reasons, a common issue is the tendency to build new or custom implementations instead of using commoditized solutions — often happening when the platform’s provided tools and solutions are considered limited or inadequate.
To keep technical debt in check, you need a digital platform that offers robust, flexible, and easy-to-integrate solutions that effectively address common challenges. Only then can teams focus on innovation and feature development without resorting to inefficient or redundant custom code, improving code quality and maintainability.
If your teams struggle to handle changes in direction, whether major or minor, the root cause may lie in the limitations of your digital platform. A robust platform should enable rapid reconfiguration and deployment of solutions – think infrastructure as code – without necessitating a complete rebuild. Flexibility is key; your digital platform should support pivoting and scaling in new directions.
Simplifying the process of making adjustments, whether through modular design, configurable components, or automated deployment processes, empowers teams to innovate and adapt without being bogged down by technical constraints.
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Assessing your business’s need for digital platform engineering and modernization is just the beginning. The next steps involve a thorough evaluation and strategic enhancement of your digital platform, with key considerations for DevOps and automation throughout the process.
Identify and select components: Align these with your business goals and technical requirements. Explore emerging technologies like microservices architecture, where applications are built as a suite of small, independently deployable services. Embrace best practices like infrastructure as code, allowing for automated provisioning and management of your infrastructure.
Optimize existing solutions: Ensure peak performance by refactoring code, migrating systems to the cloud, or integrating more efficient tools and processes. Implement CI/CD pipelines to automate building, testing, and deployment of applications, fostering a culture of continuous delivery and rapid iteration.
Assemble and integrate: Create a cohesive, agile platform by seamlessly integrating components and optimized solutions. This allows for scalable and flexible deployment that can easily adapt to future needs and directions. Leverage DevOps principles to break down silos between development and operations teams, leading to faster deployments and increased efficiency.
By making calculated strategic investments into your digital platform you position your business to meet current challenges and thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
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