Every business has its own intrinsic “value”. This value differs from one sector to the next. But one aspect forms the core of every business’s value: its know how and importantly, the know how of its staff.
As legacy application experts we often work with organisations who face challenges to the successful retention of important knowledge about their business critical applications and processes. In the worst cases, they have already lost this knowledge. This is most often the result of those people leaving or retiring who built the applications and processes decades ago. Compounding this challenge is that new staff is often not sufficiently trained to maintain these systems, for whatever reasons.
On the face of it challenges related to the loss of knowledge appear to be a problem that the use of artificial intelligence can solve. In principle, this may not be wrong. At the same time, it is not entirely accurate. AI can help us understand what was done; oftentimes, it can also help us identify how it was done. But it cannot tell us why something was done in the way it was done. But this is the most critical piece of information and is key to ensuring ongoing successful use of relevant systems – without the answer to the question of why, it is virtually impossible to grasp the logic behind business critical applications, and to organise successful know how transfers.
How can you use your core competence?
Most companies and organisations develop and use tailor-made applications to manage business critical processes. To effectively maintain, run, and further develop these applications, businesses need to have high-level knowledge of aspects such as security and safety, governance, and lifecycle management throughout the entire development process. More and more businesses use external resources for application development.
Controlling development processes is becoming increasingly important to improve quality, security, and comprehensive long term maintainability.
To achieve these goals, organisations need a continuous discovery and improvement process. This in turn requires sustainable processes for ongoing know how development and documentation, and for effective transfer of know how.
Why is a focus on know how transfer so important?
CIOs in all large businesses and organisations focus on designing and implementing know how transfer strategies. If this is accompanied by increasing pressure to reduce costs and to reduce the resources used, the result is a need to implement large scale streamlining projects. Such streamlining aimed at simplifying functionalities, reducing technology gaps, and deploying improved technologies is a necessary step to introduce new, more effective or more modern applications into the organisation.
Only organisations able to make well-grounded decisions about costs, effort, activities, quality, maintainability, efficiency, and dependencies within their applications meet the necessary requirements for a successful and secure future of their business critical applications.
This is what makes it so important that companies establish processes to sustainably and continuously transfer know how internally. Without successful know how transfer businesses will find it impossible to continuously develop and to continuously innovate.
To highlight the consequences of lacking know how transfer processes, it is helpful to consider a few scenarios. All these scenarios assume that existing applications need to be replaced or are simply no longer needed. Often, the worst case scenario is that people with know how leave an organisation before the application can be switched off or replaced. In such a scenario, relevant market-driven or legal requirements can only be met with external, costly support, and lots of internal effort – if they can be met at all. Knowingly not introducing processes to transfer know how can very quickly and very easily risk an organisation’s very existince.
Why EasiRun?
Transferring know-how contributes to increased organisational efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness.
EasiRun helps you to identify the right questions, and to implement the strategies that result from the answers to those questions.
Our added value? In addition to ensuring successful application and process modernisation, we also safeguard the transfer of relevant knowledge and business critical application logic.
We have already successfully completed many projects where our customers faced similar challenges. These projects led us to the important realisation that modernisation alone is not enough for businesses to continue to thrive. It motivated us to develop an approach that offers our customers something which artificial intelligence cannot deliver: an insightful and deep understanding of important business critical applications and the transfer of know how from one generation to the next. Retain the know how you need to continue to grow and thrive and avoid this know how residing in just one person’s mind!
Using specific and proven solutions and methods we can show you how you, too, can establish successful know how transfer processes.
