How to Ensure Your Modernization Project is a Success Part 1
When it comes to modernization, migration is often overlooked in the planning process. It’s no wonder that digital transformation failure rates have been upwards of 70% according to major consulting firms. Recently, Carole-Ann Berlioz, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Sparkling Logic shared her insights from client migration projects in our webinar An End-User Approach to Modernizing Operational Decision-Making. In this 3-part series, we dive deeper into the webinar key takeaways:
- First, include migration support capabilities as part of your new technology evaluation
- Second, pre-plan the migration project so it doesn’t take years
- Finally, test, test, test!
While the blog series provides tips for any modernization initiative, we will focus on projects related to operational decision-making and decision management.
The Case For Decision Modernization
Operational decisions are the day-to-day, repetitive, and often high-frequency decisions that keep an organization running and impact an organization’s bottom line. Examples include:
- In Insurance, whether or not to accept an insurance claim
- In Financial Services, how to price a credit offer for an applicant
- In Retail, how to efficiently get your products to your retail locations
- In Healthcare, what treatment plan to recommend to a patient
In an effort to gain more operational efficiencies, organizations have invested in automating many of these operational decisions. However, more often than not, the focus was on processes and not on the decision-making itself. As a result, the code responsible for decision-making is typically buried within various systems. Consequently, managing decisions is cumbersome and requires IT intervention. Even small changes to decision logic would require going through the system development life cycle, preventing organizations from adapting quickly to market, regulatory, and other external changes. Therefore, many decision modernization projects involve isolating the code responsible for executing decision logic and treating it as a separate asset to enable the business to:
- Ensure the consistency of decisions
- Rapidly adjust decision logic
- Improve decision quality over time
Why Migration Should Be a Part of Your Decision Modernization Planning Process
From use-case specific technologies like loan origination software to universal decision management platforms like SMARTS, there are many technologies available to choose from. Regardless of whether you build or buy, migration should be front and center of your modernization planning process. That’s because how you migrate will determine how well your new system will serve the end user — the business analysts responsible for managing those operational decisions.
This brings us to what we call the “Golden Rule” of Decision Migration: think like a Business Analyst because the future of decisions lies in their hands. And in our experience, the #1 thing business analysts want to avoid is code. In our next post, we will cover decision migration best practices to minimize code.
Want to learn how SMARTS empowers business analysts to make smarter, faster operational decisions? Contact us today to request a custom demo.