How to Lower the Complexity when Starting Your Digital Transformation

Yes, you can start your digital transformation with less complexity.

Many people ask where to start their digital transformation initiative. There’s nothing like staring down a major initiative where many other companies have tried and failed. Plus there are the grim realities of competing business priorities, budgets, staff resources, approaches and so on.

What if you could start without all of the above concerns? Fact is, with new microservice-API technologies like OpenLegacy, you can indeed start your journey starting with your first important destination before going around the world. 

The analogy directly applies to the first step. Choose a small, easily definable project that causes sufficient pain across the enterprise. Let’s call that your minimum viable product (MVP) for your digital transformation - one small step.

Because an MVP focuses on a small use case, it lowers the complexity, people involved and time it takes. The best way to build an MVP is start with a use case that adds value and build it quickly to show results. There are 2 main approaches to finding the use case.

• 1) Contract-first - start with a business need, then build a contract or set of contracts (APIs) representing that need. From there, figure out what assets you have to build the necessary functionality to realize the APIs. This is a top-down development approach.
• 2) Contract-last - start by looking at your systems and seeing who is using specific functionality. From there look at requests for additional functionality and decide to build based upon those usage patterns. It is a bottom up way to figure out needed functionality

OpenLegacy can help whether you use a contract-first or contract-last approach. The platform translates whatever components of the monolith you choose and exposes functionality as APIs with the underlying connecting code. This allows you to complete the system quickly and easily and simplifies the integration scenario. Using OpenLegacy’s platform, teams can follow a use case driven approach.

For additional steps that help you get started with your digital transformation, please register for our webinar

Marty Bakal has 25 years' experience in various facets of enterprise integration, agile and DevOps. As the Product Evangelist and Product Marketing Director for OpenLegacy, Marty's focus is on providing content to answer common questions about the legacy integration aspects of digital transformation.