Unlocking Business Growth Through Software Modernization

Technology leaders today face a defining challenge: balancing innovation with the burden of legacy systems. With nearly half of CIOs and technology executives prioritizing enterprise application modernization, the mandate is clear—modernize to compete, scale, and secure your technology investments. 

But many organizations remain stuck, weighed down by uncertainty, complexity, and misalignment between business and technology priorities. The good news? The path forward is clearer than it seems. 

Software Modernization’s Business Potential 

When done right, software modernization becomes a business growth strategy. The right technology foundation enables companies to scale, reduce costs, and deliver better experiences. The impact goes beyond technology—it’s about building a business that’s ready for what’s next. 

Here’s what we’ve seen software modernization accomplish for companies: 

• Boost Revenue: Scale operations, support larger customers, and create new revenue streams with a modern software platform. 
• Cut Costs: Optimize cloud spend and reduce ongoing maintenance costs by adopting a scalable, efficient architecture. 
• Enhance Features: Leverage modern technology stacks to improve system capabilities and create a better user experience. 
• Empower Developers: Equip teams with modern tools and architectures that drive innovation, automation and developer productivity, leading to an improved developer experience. 
• Acquire and Retain Talent: Make it easier to attract and retain skilled developers who have the skills for and want to work with modern technology stacks. 
• Increase Agility: Develop faster, integrate new technologies easier, and adapt to changing business needs.  

What Holds Back Organizations from Modernizing Their Software Applications?

While many organizations want to modernize their enterprise applications—and understand the benefits—several obstacles prevent them from making meaningful progress. Do any of these common challenges sound familiar?

Unclear Risks

Many legacy systems lack documentation, making it difficult to understand dependencies and risks of modernization.

Misalignment Between IT and Business

Modernization that’s tech-driven rather than business-led rarely succeeds. And organizations that prioritize cost-cutting without aligning to clear business goals also struggle to sustain modernization.

Fear of Disruption

Leaders often worry about cost, compliance risks, and operational instability during the transition.

Talent Shortages

Finding skilled professionals who understand both legacy and modern technologies is increasingly difficult.

Unorganized Approach

Organizations often lack a structured roadmap, leading to inefficient, one-off modernization efforts.

5 Steps to Jumpstart Your Software Modernization Projects

A successful modernization strategy requires a thoughtful, phased approach that aligns with business objectives focuses on driving value. Here’s how to make it work:

1. Start with the business case: Shift the conversation from cost reduction to business growth. Focus on how modernization enables agility, innovation, and customer experience.
   
   
2. Align IT and business teams: Modernization succeeds when technology leaders and business stakeholders co-create the roadmap.
   
   » TRY THIS: Align IT and business teams ensures modernization efforts deliver real results. We did this when rationalizing a community bank’s application portfolio. It led to a 15% reduction in IT spend while retiring six mid-tier applications—results for both IT and the business.
   
   
3. Use AI strategically: Generative AI can accelerate documentation, testing, and code modernization, but it won’t replace human expertise. Use it to enhance developer productivity, not as a silver bullet.
   
   
4. Prioritize incremental wins: Avoid ‘big bang’ transformations. Instead, modernize in phases, targeting high-impact areas first.
   
   » TRY THIS: Take an iterative approach. For example, we re-platformed a large insurance provider’s legacy tech stack into a modern, cloud-first platform, integrating five legacy apps into one—but one at a time.
   
   
5. Invest in talent and partnerships: Companies that invest in upskilling internal teams and leveraging specialized partners see more successful modernization outcomes.
   
   » TRY THIS: Engage partners who bring both industry and technology fluency.

How West Monroe Helps

We partner with our clients to modernize their custom software footprint—whether defining your modernization strategy and plan, rationalizing and decomposing applications, or executing modernization builds and sprints.

We build together, bringing deep technical expertise, industry knowledge, and a collaborative approach to ensure long-term success. Our approach taps into various GenAI accelerators and modernization tools.

Authors: Kaumil Dalal and Chris Miller