Is your information system holding you back? It is time to take action. Unleash innovation, agility, and performance with modernization designed to create value.
Your information system (IS), as it stands today, may not be broken… but it's holding you back. It's stifling innovation, slowing down your projects, increasing your costs, and exposing you to growing threats. In short, it's slowly killing you.
In an environment where speed of execution, business agility, and security have become vital, continuing to rely on an aging information system is like moving forward with the handbrake on. It's time to view application modernization not as a technical option, but as a strategic imperative. It's a project that involves long-term choices, affecting work practices, corporate culture, and the ability to innovate quickly. Modernization means preparing for the future while unlocking value in the present.
IS modernization: a rebirth, not a facelift
Modernizing your information system isn't just about "moving to the cloud" or updating your infrastructure and applications. It's about pushing the boundaries of a technical legacy that has become toxic, to build a scalable, resilient architecture aligned with your business challenges. It's a comprehensive and progressive transformation.
Several dimensions may be involved:
- Application modernization: rewriting, refactoring or replacing obsolete applications, APIization and implementation of strategic data interconnections.
- Infrastructure modernization: virtualization, containerization, transition to the cloud.
- Modernization of practices: adoption of DevOps, automation, data governance.
Why modernize now? Because every day costs more
By delaying, the problem doesn't go away. It gets worse. Here's what an outdated information system costs you every day:
- Technical debt: Every aging line of code is a ticket to complexity, instability… and exploding maintenance budgets.
- Risk of disruption: your systems are vulnerable, not very resilient, and often incompatible with new cybersecurity standards.
- Wasted time: Your IT teams are wasting valuable time putting out fires instead of creating value; and on the business side, users are dealing with slow applications, double-entry, not having the necessary information within a single application, having to juggle, etc.
- Business disconnect: without an agile information system, it is difficult to keep up with changes in customer expectations, competitors or the regulatory framework.
What a real transformation allows
IS modernization is a profound, strategic transformation. It allows for:
- Reduce the technical complexity accumulated over the years
- Unleashing innovation through more open, interoperable and agile update systems
- Aligning technologies with business priorities
- Accelerate adaptation to constantly evolving economic, regulatory or organizational models
- Rethinking business processes by simplifying them: how many layers of instructions are there in this information system? How can its updates be optimized?
And more concretely, it responds to very tangible business challenges:
- Accelerated time to market: new features delivered faster
- Strengthening security and compliance
- Cost control, through resource optimization and the flexibility of cloud models
- Improved user experience: both employees and customers benefit from a more fluid and responsive information system
- Reducing technical debt: less maintenance, more robustness
Steps to get out of the impasse
Modernization is a journey. Here are the steps to move from paralysis to performance, that is, preparing a comprehensive master plan:
- Diagnose without complacency: map applications, flows, interdependencies, technologies used, identify breaking points, which are the critical applications, those that hinder innovation or are expensive to maintain?
- Prioritize according to business impact: start with what is most holding back your transformation.
- Define a target: establish a clear and realistic vision of the target IS, consistent with the overall strategy.
- Choosing your technologies and priorities: degree of sovereignty required (core business applications), choice of clouds (public, multicloud, hybrid cloud, etc.), open source, microservices, low-code platforms... the options are numerous and you have to prioritize according to the use cases.
- Driving deep change: training, involving, evolving the culture towards greater agility and collaboration.
- Manage with rigor: clear KPIs, solid governance, IT/business co-construction.
Key success factors: think digital transformation, not migration
You're not modernizing to migrate. You're modernizing to reinvent how digital delivers value to you. To do this, here are some key considerations:
- Involve the business from the start: they know where things are going wrong. Listen to them!
- Embrace DevOps and agility to shorten cycles and unleash creativity.
- Dare to embrace technological openness: cloud, open source, low-code, applications, information systems, digitalization, etc.
- Govern: rigorous management, with clear indicators, is essential to stay on course.
- Invest in your talents: this also involves upskilling.
Pitfalls to avoid: what dooms a project before it even starts
Modernizing the IS is a delicate exercise, and certain pitfalls can compromise its success:
- Neglecting change management: tools are not enough, you need to involve teams, appoint ambassadors, present the approach regularly, give demos to department heads... In short, explain, train and reassure.
- Thinking only about infrastructure: a simple "lift and shift" to the cloud does not solve the underlying problems (usability, functional shortcuts, KPIs and reporting, interoperability, adoption rates, etc.)
- Forget cybersecurity: it must be integrated into the design of new systems.
- Working in silos: without coordination between IT and business, the risk is to build an efficient information system that is unsuitable or incomplete for its users.
- Lack of long-term vision: Modernization and digitalization are strategic levers, not just operational ones. They are part of an overall master plan.
2025 trends in application modernization
To stay ahead, here are the key trends to watch:
- Cloud-first strategies to improve the scalability, flexibility and operational efficiency of information systems
- Artificial intelligence and automation to optimize development, maintenance, updates, etc.
- Microservices architectures for more scalable and resilient applications that consolidate decision-making data
- Serverless computing to reduce costs and improve scalability
- Low-code/no-code platforms to accelerate development with fewer technical skills on lighter and less core business topics, for example
- Edge Computing for Real-Time Data Processing and Latency Reduction
- API-first approach for better interoperability between systems
- Enhanced security with robust measures integrated from the design stage in a logic of digital transformation and digitalization
Conclusions: your information system is a strategic choice. The status quo is a risk.
A static information system isn't neutral: it slows you down, exposes you, and costs you more and more. Modernizing and optimizing means regaining control. It's much more than refreshing the technology: it's reinventing how digital technology and applications support and accelerate value creation. It's building an open, agile, secure, and scalable architecture capable of adapting to future transformations. Successfully completing your digital transformation and modernizing your applications and information systems is a real bet on the future.
At Smile, we support companies looking to build a modern, open, and scalable information system. Leveraging our recognized expertise in UX, open source technologies, and the cloud, we help our clients transform their systems into drivers of sustainable innovation and improve employee experience and performance.
Do you feel like your information system is holding you back? It's time to take action.
Contact us to discuss.
