This is not a simple turn-key solution, nor is it something easily achieved without taking a step-by-step approach to your complex environments.
Let's face it, there have been many commitments made in the past to certain technology paths. There are legacy investments that are still returning enough value to cause hesitation when reaching to pull their plug. There could be partially completed projects that were chosen in the course of spending political capitol, making it nearly impossible to abandon them without endangering the entire IT landscape.
These are just a few of the issues that necessitate one of the first steps being to evaluate optimizing existing IT investments.
Existing IT
When looking to update or modernize the existing IT investments, it's about optimizing existing work.
There are many systems, services, applications and processes that make up the IT landscape. The trick is to obtain a view of them while moving towards business goals, leveraging quick wins by bringing together existing work in new and effective ways.
Business processes can often be found that leverage existing components, that once organized in a new way begin to immediately provide new business value. To illustrate this line of thought, let's imagine how leveraging existing deployed workloads and services help to optimize a financial services department.
Modernizing financial services
Each example below is optimizing by leveraging existing projects and investments, while deploying in a modern container-based Cloud platform using open technologies. They may exists as standard hosted hardware deployments, on private cloud solutions, in public cloud hosting or in hybrid-cloud environments. All four footprints are possible when leveraging open technologies and modern application development, showcased through the Red Hat Cloud Suite product.Mortgage finance process
The first example is based on the story that our financial institution to date has been processing mortgages using several applications and systems by hand. The mortgage moved slowly through the process without real metrics and without real insights into the results of automation efforts.Several steps in the mortgage process, such as validation of data, services for credit checking applicants and automating calculations were implemented as centralized services. The issue is now to tie this all together, channel the needed user interactions and capture the metrics for reporting effectiveness of the process.
Available online in Red Hat Demo Central and leveraging open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BPM Suite along with the OpenShift Container Platform, the Mortgage Finance demo project delivers a nice optimized solution.Generic financial loans
This example takes the existing business logic and integrates a once manual ad-hoc system and modernizes it into a process with self-contained user tasks, automated business logic invocations and cross process signaling to ensure marketing databases are updated with interactions based on the loan request.Available online at Red Hat Demo Central and leveraging open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BPM Suite along with the OpenShift Container Platform, the Generic Loan example is delivering another modernized financial process solution.
Optimize IT series
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If interested in reading more you can catch up on the other areas learning how optimizing process applications enables leveraging your existing investments:
- Modernizing HR processes
- Modernizing Financial processes
- Modernizing Retail processes
- Modernizing Travel processes