Drive Enhanced Application Functionality

Federal agencies are frequently hampered by legacy applications.

"The burden of legacy technologies in government puts innovation on a path of incremental improvement when agility and quick solution delivery is expected," said Rick Howard, research director at Gartner. 

To further complicate matters, they face a lack of associated documentation, as well as an exodus of institutional knowledge as existing skilled workers are replaced. Therefore, the largest obstacle to modernization is probably the CIO’s lack of knowledge of the various functions inside application layers, and clarity about business functions may currently be obscured from the CIO’s view.

This is why Dell Services Federal Government (DSFG) develops customized strategic modernization roadmaps, which offer multiple options to help realize a future state, whether it’s a lower-cost alternative, a more agile solution, enhanced functionality or all of these. Using industry-leading products, DSFG conducts dependency analyses of an organization’s code, parsing the code and completing an affinity analysis to identify business functions at the code level.

This analysis enables our team to suggest multiple, viable options—rather than promote a single, “one-size-fits-all” solution—for a future state that delivers an agile solution with enhanced functionality in a modern, architected environment that significantly lowers maintenance costs. These options will vary from agency to agency and depend upon their individual needs. Blending automation with proven methodology makes code analysis relevant to real-world modernization and delves far deeper than the more superficial approach of examining old documentation and replicating it in new languages and platforms. (That approach barely scratches the surface with simple screen scraping that won’t provide a picture complete enough to truly modernize apps and deliver operational agility within budgetary constraints.)

If a CIO’s primary objectives are achieving the right functionality, fixing processes and enabling cloud and mobility, a DSFG roadmap will probably concentrate on re-architecture. However, if the focus is more on cost savings and preservation of existing IT investments, the DSFG roadmap will likely emphasize re-hosting, since application re-hosting solutions move existing business logic and data investments onto modern platforms. My next post will highlight the benefits of application re-hosting as a vital part of an apps mod initiative and will provide a closer examination of what it can help CIOs achieve.

DSFG is ready to serve as your trusted IT partner. We offer a proven, 20-year heritage with federal agencies and success with more than 1,350 IT initiatives for over 350 federal government and commercial organizations of every size.

Learn how apps mod can help you with application re-hosting by DSFG. Contact a Dell federal government expert today at: dell.com/federalservices.

About the Author: Sanjeev Nehra