‘Digital Transformation’ is a buzzword used by business leaders, journalists and marketers alike to allude to an ever-changing benchmark of technological optimisation.
The phrase refers to businesses’ attempts to harness emerging technologies to their maximum potential, but is heavily bound with the need to better serve customers and workforces facing outdated and inefficient systems. A growing discord between the efficiency of personal technology and that of workspace desktops — marred by slow, inefficient legacy systems that fail to live up to modern UI/UX standards — has made it clear that enterprises must rise to new expectations.
Businesses that treat large-scale modernisation as the finite process of overhauling and replacing outdated systems set themselves up for a demanding and disruptive journey. With just 16% of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey reporting a successful and sustainable digital transformation, it is clear that a modernisation effort with a set start and finish point is likely to fall flat. The concept of ‘digital transformation’ is arbitrary and unquantifiable — no truly digital business ever finishes evolving, and the organisations that best serve customers and users alike are those that continuously innovate and adapt.
There are a number of reasons why modernisation processes that follow the popular narrative of ‘digital transformation’ are not sustainable. Despite new technologies and development processes showing promise for the future, major organisations remain dependent on complex, monolithic legacy structures. With 70% of time and resources spent on their maintenance, enterprises face a paradox by which legacy systems both demand and inhibit modernisation. Attempting to replace inefficient technology instantly risks the downtime of data and processes that have become vital to business functioning over the years.
Fear of and resistance to change are also likely, and business leaders must secure the buy-in of multiple dispersed teams in order to facilitate the successful, widespread adoption of new tools and processes among users and developers alike. Implementing a business-wide cultural shift to a new, agile methodology is not an overnight process, nor is gathering the metrics to support investment decisions and ensure the utility of new technologies.
With a number of risk factors to consider, enterprises caught between the need for continued access to legacy apps and the need to meet growing user expectations must take stock of current failings. In doing so, they must also uphold a continued receptivity and responsiveness to the potential of emerging technologies to meet unique business challenges. In prioritising the utility over the technology itself, enterprises can take a modular, incremental approach to modernisation. Those that do so stand to gain sustainable, long term growth and the ability to keep their focus on the future.
Arthos is the development and deployment framework transforming legacy desktops, and was created in response to the integration and performance issues we faced during the delivery of bespoke, mission critical applications to major financial institutions. Having been designing and developing applications with HTML5 and microservice architectures for 10 years, we found that the architectures with which we were trying to integrate our new software failed to do the technology justice.
With backgrounds in building and running trading platforms and overseeing major transformation projects respectively, founder and CEO Kerem Ozelli and Joanne Gibson had confronted issues with outdated, underperforming structures a number of times before founding d:code:it. Spurred by frustration and equipped with expertise, we developed a solution that would facilitate a fully HTML5 integrated desktop. But as Arthos was introduced to more and more clients, the framework evolved — becoming a living set of tools, components and resources that grew with the needs of each enterprise.
Arthos’ container framework permits clients to continue running critical legacy systems, while building and running web applications as native apps on Window, Mac and Linux. Combatting application saturation and fragmentation, it allows new, legacy and third party applications to work seamlessly in a unified, cross-functional experience regardless of the language they’re built in.
By providing a series of targeted solutions, Arthos combats every element of enterprise modernisation. The unique inclusion of a design system, user training toolkit, ADA accessibility compliance tool and insights and analytics solution, amongst others, equips clients with a partnership for continuous, sustained innovation.
