Driving enterprise success: Taking a holistic approach to app modernisation with Microsoft Azure

What is app modernisation and why is it important right now?

App modernisation, sometimes just known as replatforming, is the process of transforming and updating existing applications and platforms to better align with modern tech and architectures. It involves reimagining the underlying infrastructure, architecture, and design of your application to enhance things like performance, scalability, security, and maintainability. The transformation may include migrating applications to cloud platforms, adopting new architecture patterns like microservices, or assessing the user experience and interfaces.

Avoiding increased technical debt

The burden of technical debt creates a two-speed development cycle, where a significant amount of time and money is allocated to support and maintenance, slowing down the implementation of new features and enhancements. Unfortunately, this often results in a growing, rather than diminishing, technical debt. To break free from this cycle, technical teams look to modernisation projects that involve replatforming. By modernising your technical foundation, you can create a solid base for future growth and innovation, freeing yourself from the constraints of technical debt.

Unleashing the power of human-centred design

Human-centred design (HCD) can often benefit modernisation projects as it prioritises the needs and preferences of your users, while balancing organisational requirements and commercial realities. 

The replatforming process presents an ideal opportunity to assess and enhance the user experience for both staff and customers. Reviewing administrative processes, workflows, and product design can help to identify potential efficiency gains and improve both back-end and front-end functionalities. 

By embracing human-centred design in your modernisation efforts, you can create a flexible digital product that meets user needs, reduces costs and drives business success. 

Benefits of incorporating HCD practices into the platform modernisation process:

• Enhanced User Satisfaction: Placing user needs at the centre of the modernisation process, will deliver a more seamless user experience – leading to higher overall satisfaction, increased engagement, and improved customer loyalty.
• Reduced Development Costs: Incorporating HCD principles early in the modernisation process helps identify usability issues, design flaws, and user concerns early. Addressing these issues before implementation avoids costly rework and ensures the final product meets user expectations, reducing development costs later down the track.
• Inclusive and Accessible Solutions: Adhering to accessibility standards ensures your digital product is accessible to a broader audience, demonstrating inclusivity and maximising user reach.
• Customer-Centric Approach: Prioritising HCD demonstrates a commitment to customer satisfaction. A customer-centric approach builds trust, improves communication, and streamlines user interactions, ultimately reducing administrative burdens and helping users achieve their goals more easily.

Design beyond interfaces

Careful planning and a future-forward approach are essential for success in modernisation projects – especially when dealing with legacy systems. A well-designed solution and systems architecture will enable the decomposition of monolithic architectures, define integration strategies, embrace cloud-native principles, and address security and compliance requirements. Getting these aspects right will ensure extensibility, scalability and resiliency of your platform. This transformation will open up new integration pathways, often lowers cost of ownership (including infrastructure cost) and reduces the amount of custom software by leveraging the benefits of cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure. As a result, user experience improves, maintenance becomes easier, and the ability to handle increasing workloads effectively is enhanced.

In our validation toolkit, we highly recommend conducting small pilots during the design phase. This approach allows for rapid validation of technical assumptions, helps mitigate risks, and instils confidence in the chosen approach. By incorporating these proof of concepts, you can make more informed decisions and significantly increase the likelihood of project success.

The Microsoft advantage

Azure is a natural choice for many organisations who are already familiar with Microsoft products. While it has seamless integration with the Microsoft suite (allowing IT project teams to maximise their investments in Office 365 and Active Directory), Azure itself is a standalone complete set of best-in-class infrastructure solutions appropriate for most application needs. Azure offers cost-effective, consumption based pricing that can scale with the usage – with a very low cost of entry and controlled billing with scaling. Microsoft’s certified security is trusted by both governments and large global enterprises ensuring compliance with any supplier infosec requirements. Another advantage is .NET-is treated as a first class citizen within Azure, with excellent support and full compatibility. 

When modernising web applications with Microsoft Azure, you can strategically employ a wide range of services and technologies that cover a breadth of function areas and at varied levels of management across IAAS and PAAS depending on the level of responsibility and control required.  

Azure’s complete cloud  environment provides resources that will enable you to deliver the right solution for your unique business needs; without investing in building  boilerplate generic infrastructure, data and networking services. Azure is appropriate from the most basic apps to complex cloud-enabled enterprise applications. Off the shelf tools like Azure Active Directory for identity management and Event Hub for messaging reduce bespoke code investment and provide best-in-class options to solve common problems under the one service. 

We specialise and have delivered success using modern serverless componentry which is cost effective, hyper scalable and suits common design patterns in microservices and event driven architectures. This mixed with Azure’s robust data, networking and analytics resources provides a comprehensive and future-ready cloud platform to support the growth and success of your organisation. 

Real-world success stories

Conduct has collaborated with Cleanaway, a leader in waste management, as well as some of Australia’s biggest brands, for their app modernisation journeys. Cleanaway transformed their waste management operations by focusing on user-centric interfaces and streamlined workflows. Similarly, other clients have utilised rapid prototyping to visualise and iterate proposed solutions, ensuring their final modernised application aligned with their goals and exceeded user expectations. Leveraging human-centred design methodologies (like user research and persona development) we’ve successfully facilitated transformations for client partners, showcasing the powerful impact app modernisation can have with advanced Microsoft technologies.

A Winning formula for digital transformation

Conduct’s unique approach, which combines HCD, rapid prototyping, and robust enterprise grade technical solution design, has proven to be a winning formula for accelerating app modernisation within organisations weighed down with legacy and tech debt built over years of additive point solutions. With valuable insights gained from successful collaborations with Cleanaway, ISUZU, Kmart, ETS and other notable clients, we are equipped to unlock your app modernisation potential and deliver a holistic approach.