We are living in the era of booming technological innovations and digital transformation. There are countless new tools and solutions designed to empower enterprises and simplify business processes being released every year. Despite this, IT departments in companies across all industries are currently working under more pressure than ever before.
Life cycles of enterprise technologies are getting shorter. IT solutions that were implemented only a few years ago — and were considered cutting edge — are now legacy systems. In addition, customer expectations follow and sometimes outrun technological advancement. The result is accelerated market demand for seamless experiences and streamlined processes. Your competitors are capitalizing on the benefits of new business technologies as much as possible, threatening to leave those who aren’t able to keep up in the dust. Business leaders are looking to reap the benefits of Industry 4.0 without a clear understanding of what it takes to implement.
As a result, IT departments feel overburdened with tasks and responsibilities. They are failing to modernize their solutions in a timely manner and are unable to deliver the needed advancements.
What are IT department challenges in the Industry 4.0 era?
Let’s take a look at some of the most common challenges IT departments are facing today.
Skills and staff shortage
Modern-day enterprise infrastructure gets increasingly complex and multicomponent. It requires more human resources with specialized knowledge of specific platforms and technology stacks in order to deliver business capabilities. Due to that, IT departments are facing shortages of qualified staff. This prevents them from implementing modernization projects. It also causes considerable delays in the execution of projects.
Growing app development complexity
Even relatively simple enterprise apps and tools are getting more difficult to develop. This is because they need to support a growing number of platforms, such as mobile devices, browsers, operating systems, and servers.
Cumulative technical debt
High amounts of technical debt of various forms, such as outdated code, “temporary” solutions, and unsupported platforms, are getting accumulated over time. This increases maintenance costs and makes modernization even more expensive and labor-intensive.
Legacy apps and processes dependency
The majority of enterprises today continue to rely on long-outdated legacy applications and difficult, expensive to maintain business processes. They typically have stability issues, show poor performance, and lack the support of modern-day technologies. To make things worse, finding specialists knowledgeable in old technologies is getting harder every year.
Quality assurance issues
When trying to modernize legacy apps with specialized solutions, IT teams often face serious quality issues as updated applications fail to support the existing business processes logic.
No or very limited modernization budget
Last but certainly not least, many companies can’t afford or are unwilling to allocate significant budgets for updating their IT infrastructures. The costs of both maintaining and modernizing legacy systems are growing over time. It is easy to understand why being unable to invest in a full-scale modernization becomes a vicious circle. It causes a continuous deterioration of IT systems that negatively affects business metrics.
Needing to modernize IT infrastructure but lacking the capacity to do so is one of the most fundamental problems IT leaders have today.
How can I bridge the IT modernization gap with low-code development?
These and other challenges force IT departments to look for new approaches to allow them to modernize their enterprise systems. They want solutions without the need for massive budgets. They also want to avoid hiring dozens of expensive technology experts and re-engineering their whole IT infrastructure and risking new errors in business operations.
Luckily, there is a solution that makes the IT modernization gap bridgeable. It allows organizations to overcome most of these problems even if they can’t afford the considerable investment.
Powerful low-code development platforms, such as Visual LANSA, empower overburdened IT departments and streamline modernization efforts using available resources.
Here is how Visual LANSA can make your IT department up to 10 times more productive. It will allow them to modernize your legacy solutions and respond to requests from your customers and executives much faster.
Accelerated application development
Compared to traditional application development, low-code greatly minimizes hand-coding in multiple languages. It also maximizes code re-use, reduces risk, and eliminates the need to hire costly full-stack developers. As a result, companies using Visual LANSA to develop and modernize legacy enterprise tools report an increase in IT output of up to 10 times.
Streamlined cross-platform deployment
There is another major advantage of using LANSA’s low-code development platform. This is the fact that developers don’t have to worry about how their projects will be deployed across various architectures or platforms. This means they can remain focused on building business applications. With LANSA’s built-in cross-platform capabilities, you can migrate your applications between any hybrid-mix of Cloud and on-premise Windows, Linux, or IBM i platforms with little or no code modification.
Simple integration with existing legacy apps and databases
Another typical headache for IT departments is the need to integrate new tools with existing databases, legacy code, and other applications. LANSA’s low-code platform makes it extremely easy to extend data from any database on any platform to web, mobile, and desktop applications.
Accessible data usage capabilities
The ability to organize, control and use data is one of the most important parts of cutting-edge enterprise IT solutions. Modern systems need to be able to collect and analyze data effectively, as well as to transfer the data across platforms without delays. LANSA’s low-code platform allows you to extend data from any database on any platform to web, mobile, and desktop applications. It also allows you to use web services and APIs to support data flowing through existing back-office systems and business processes.
Easily customizable rules and business logic
Finally, customizing and managing rules and constraints throughout the enterprise IT network can be another time and energy-consuming process. It puts additional pressure on IT departments. LANSA solves this problem by allowing users to externally define system-wide business logic in a single repository. Best of all, it is done without coding rules at the application or database level. LANSA also enforces these centrally defined rules and data constraints throughout all LANSA-developed applications. It doesn’t matter what platform they are deployed on.
How can I take advantage of LANSA’s solutions to improve my business?
The IT modernization gap is a serious problem. It makes IT departments across industries feel increasingly overwhelmed and powerless. Not being able to effectively modernize their IT infrastructure, businesses are getting bogged down in legacy applications and problematic business processes.
LANSA offers a solution to this problem by empowering IT departments with a handful of time-proven tools created to enable the development and implementation of enterprise IT innovations at low cost and without disrupting current business operations. Save time and money by focusing on what needs to be modernized in your IT systems instead of worrying about funds, technical issues, and shortage of human resources.
Ready to get started? Contact us at Lansa.com
