Technology is constantly evolving—so much that most organizations can’t keep up. Organizations that continue to rely on aging legacy systems to support their needs find that these systems are difficult to maintain, update, or replace. The result is that 60-80% of IT budgets focus on maintaining legacy systems and not evolving or improving. These operations and maintenance costs provide a lower return on investment and restrict allocation of funds to higher value initiatives.
We recognize that many Agencies face critical technology modernization hurdles as they move away from aging hardware and software or as they shift to newer technologies. The Technology Modernization Practice was formed with the current informational technology trends in mind. Our approach to Technology Modernization is holistic: we apply systems thinking Practices, ensuring that business goals, processes, requirements, limitation of legacy systems, and total cost of ownership are central to migrating, evolving, and modernizing a client’s IT infrastructure and software assets. We look at the big picture and use industry best Practices coupled with our proven record of successful solution implementations to take our client’s technology needs robustly into the future.
We identified four capabilities necessary for tackling the technology modernization challenge and have made these our core capabilities:
- Requirements Management & Design
- Software Development & Architecture
- Automated Infrastructure
- Continuous Testing Enablement
Our goal is to understand what our customer’s objectives are, uncover real problems, and move forward with a solutions-oriented approach to designing and managing system requirements. We aim to improve the user’s overall experience through the visual impact of layout and design. We conduct requirements analyses, a process we believe is critical to the success or failure of a system or software project, giving considerable attention to each stage of the design process through user-driven design and development. Elicitation techniques are used to conduct conversations around desired functionality. Through release management, we take a software build through different stages of the design process, from testing and deployment to release.
We develop software that serves a variety of purposes for our clients. Our work encompasses every stage required for the creation and launch of new or re-engineered software by developing new standards, frameworks, and design approaches; acting as evangelists for new technologies; and utilizing front-end and back-end design and development techniques and tools.
We believe one of the key benefits of infrastructure automation is the agility it brings to both development and operations. We leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Practices to auto scale, self-heal, spin up, and take down environments, assuring that there is not only consistency in quality and functionality, but also in performance.
The idea of “shifting testing left” is more than just a concept at KYC. To us, this is a Practice that helps reduce or eliminate risk, so we go to great lengths to make it standard for our development teams. We are constantly seeking ways to test earlier in the development cycle, and test often, so that quality is baked into the systems we develop and not forced in at the end. We enhance our development processes by incorporating automated testing into the CI/CD build and deploy pipeline to initiate automated unit, smoke, functional, security, and performance tests with each deployment.
Our Technology Modernization Practice helps our clients navigate continuous change through a set of tested, secure, and performance-enhancing solutions including:
- Next Generation Architectures
- Scaled Agile and DevSecOps Best Practices
- Automated Secure Multi-Cloud Infrastructures
As a recognized thought-leader staffed with expert professionals, we understand system interdependencies and organizational dynamics that impact our clients. We deliver excellence through our approach to managing change, advocating for our customers, keeping a pulse on projects, and managing customers and project lifecycles. Our Technology Modernization Practice addresses our client’s unique technology challenges and brings solutions to the table that are forward-thinking, risk-evading, and cost-reducing.