Surviving Digital Transformation: From Legacy Applications to New IT

By Ernest Stambouly

A book is for corporate technology executives with the concern for business continuity in a climate of high disruption and digital transformation. It offers every decision-maker in medium and large companies a fresh outlook and approach for dealing with their existing computing capabilities, the “legacy enterprise applications” that their business have come to rely on, as they confront the inevitable threats and opportunities of digital transformation.

This is a book of strategy written for the pragmatic executive looking to simplify and reduce the risks of the daunting challenge of coping with digital transformation, New IT, and third platform technologies. It accomplishes its objective by offering unique and powerful distinctions, new concepts, and simply by altering how to think about radical change. The author is a long time performer, educator and advisor in enterprise computing evolution, migration, and of recent, digital transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ernest Stambouly
• Release date: Sep 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9780996575218

Ernest Stambouly

Ernest Stambouly is a business professional who leads by inspiring others to perform and achieve their potential in highly challenging environments and competitive markets.Born in 1962, he immigrated to Southern California in 1987 to pursue a Masters in Computer Science. He spent the first decade of his career in a technical position, then chose to pursue a different career serving human potential in the corporate world and local community. He became a business technology consultant for large enterprises, coach for highly performing teams, counselor for small-business entrepreneurs, and executive coach for established non-profit organizations in Orange County, California.As an author, the focus of his writing is to help individuals and businesses join the digital revolution by modernizing their practices, changing the way they conduct business, and themselves, to leverage digital technology for greater returns.Being an accomplished music composer and performer, he brings unique competitive value to his clients by drawing on his artistry to create new thinking and practices in professional and social settings.

Book preview

Surviving Digital Transformation: From Legacy Applications to New IT

The Technology Executive’s Definitive Guide to Modernization Strategy in the Age of Disruption

Surviving Digital Transformation: From Legacy Applications to New IT

The Technology Executive’s Definitive Guide to Modernization Strategy in the Age of Disruption

Ernest Stambouly

Copyright © 2016, Sprymood Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, to [e-mail].

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher through the Website or email us at [e-mail].

Published in the United States of America

First Edition

ISBN 978-0-9965752-1-8

Table of Contents

Introduction

Preface

Modernizing Business Computing Capabilities

The Modernization Strategy

The Grounding for the Rapid Modernization Strategy

Unconcealing Motivators, Objectives and Concerns

Conventional Approaches to Legacy Migration

The model-driven Computing Modernization Framework (md-CMF)

The md-CMF Explained

Where to Start

In Closing

Author’s Notes

Works Cited

Introduction

This book is for corporate technology executives with the concern for business continuity in a climate of high disruption and digital transformation. It offers every decision-maker in medium and large companies a fresh outlook and approach for dealing with their existing computing capabilities, the legacy enterprise applications that their business have come to rely on, as they confront the inevitable threats and opportunities of digital transformation, the adaptation to radical and disruptive digital technologies.

While the standard reaction is to migrate legacy enterprise applications to new technologies and infrastructures, we will show in this book that migration is an obsolete concept in the digital age. As an adequate replacement, we make the case for business modernization, a strategy for modernizing business computing capabilities against a stable base of core business values. The aim of modernizing is to evolve consistently with the expected standards of the digital economy, which is a market economy transformed by a stream of radical marketplace changes caused by disruptive digital technologies.

The real value this book intends to offer is to simplify the technology executive’s daunting challenge of coping with digital transformation, simply by altering how to think about radical change.

I ran across an unusual word the other day, the meaning of which struck a chord with me. I’ve been looking for it. Anastrophic is the reversal of the natural order of things, a notion usually used for literary effect, the deliberate inversion of word placement in a sentence, used for emphasis. In life situations, anastrophic refers to the reversal of the natural order of that which is of dominant importance.

Throughout the history of enterprise computing, somewhere along the way, we placed technology before human and business concerns. The natural order is human and business concerns first, which are universal and relatively unchanging across social historical contexts, and relative to changes in technology. But with technology at the forefront, our equilibrium was toppled whenever disruptive technologies came along. Although it is understood that radical technologies disrupt the way by which we do business, our concern is how to cope with the disruption most effectively, strategically, and competitively. Let’s look at a parallel to make the point.

A master swordsman will tell you that he sees his sword (technology) as an extension of his arm in battle. Our arm is fundamental to our survival, and it never changes with new technologies. It simply has to learn how to extend its capacity with the new technologies. The master swordsman will also tell you that thinking of your sword as a weapon that is separate from your arm is anastrophic – which incidentally, in this case, also means locally catastrophic.

In swordsmanship, the difference in skill between a swordsman who thinks of the sword as an extension of his arm and the one who sees it as a weapon separate from his body is the same difference between an Olympian and a regular athlete. This simple shift in how we see things makes the entire difference. The technical term for this shift is called ontological. In a larger context, it is a shift in worldview. Please hold on to this term and its meaning because we will be using it throughout the book.

Therefore, the challenge of digital transformation is located not so much in coping with the rush of new and disruptive computing technologies by building roadmaps and migration plans. But many leaders, we noticed, act as if it were. The challenge is located in taking care of business, social and economic concerns first, both of which are human social endeavors, not technological ones. And the challenge is ontological, which means, we overcome it by first shifting our worldview.

What is Digital Transformation?

How did the swordsman arm transform when the handgun showed up? The arm did not transform at all. But the handgun amplified his capacity in battle in ways incomprehensible when seen from within the skill of swordsmanship. Decades of practice and training for close proximity combat are all obsoleted now by the much simpler skill of eye and finger trigger coordination at a distance.

We might ask, did the swordsman ‘migrate’ from the sword to the handgun? Not at all. The swordsman had to abandon the sword (perhaps keeping it for the joy of marital arts practice), and he had to revisit the fundamental purpose of swordsmanship: martial combat. Therefore, transformation occurred only in the abandonment of the sword and the re-examining of that which is dominantly important: combat capability, and not the technology of swords. Not only a battalion of the best of swordsmen cannot defeat a battalion of soldiers equipped with guns, but the dynamics of the battle are radically different – in terms of proximity, scale of damage across time, and new possibilities in offense and defense.

In enterprise computing, when we try to squeeze new technology that is radically different into existing infrastructures, we annul the power and possibilities the new technology opens up for us. This is what migration tries to do. But digital transformation is a fundamentally different concept than application migration.

Transformation is when we step into a different range and scale of possibilities for business and social concerns, possibilities that are incomprehensible when seen from the context of the legacy application and underlying technologies. In the nineties, Intranets were the attempt of centralized, closed, top-down hierarchical corporations to adapt the Internet, a distributed, open, and networked technology to their in-house computing infrastructure. Although we know that Intranets had their localized utility, the possibilities of global commerce, and the scale of political, demographic and economic change the Internet created were incomprehensible when seen through the rationales of Intranets.

Digital transformation, and in particular for enterprise computing, refers to change that can only occur by abandoning attachment to existing legacy enterprise applications, and revisiting the fundamental purpose of using computing technologies. Such purpose must always be located in business and human concerns. Locating