Outdated IT systems with a modern process? It can be done!

Many organizations work with multiple – often older – IT systems at a time, meaning that their operational processes are broken up over multiple applications. This often leads to a less pleasant user experience and a lot of manual work. In this blog, our colleague Maarten Veger explains how to do things differently.

An application landscape is like a garden

I used to work for one of the Netherlands’ major financial institutes. There were an immense number of – often older – applications in that organization and inventory wasn’t easy. Such a mishmash of systems can be detrimental to efficiency. I sometimes compare an application landscape to a garden: if you don’t maintain it, everything will be one big mess before you know it. Then, try to discern your prized roses or lilies from the weeds among the shambles. In any case, it clutters up your garden.

Congestion

This is what the application landscapes look like for some organizations. Some systems are outdated, but as long as there is no urgency to do something about it, they keep slowly withering. Furthermore, it’s not always that easy to quickly build integrations towards – particularly older – applications. These days, however, organizations have to meet the wishes of different generations. The number of people who want to make a phone call to take care of something is dwindling. A special self-service portal is the least you have to offer, but more and more people want to take care of daily life through mobile apps or other modern channels. That leads to congestion.

Seamless whole

It is our beautiful task to build a modern end-to-end process for that client in order to do things like quickly take out a loan online, with that process being as automated as possible. With that, they not only met the customers’ wishes; it also saved the department a lot of work. During that process, data was consecutively loaded and then stored to various applications. Of course, the user shouldn’t be able to see what happens behind the scenes, and the end-to-end process should be experienced as one seamless whole, with a uniform experience and look and feel.

Automating repetitive actions with Robotic Process Automation

Of course, it would be best to be able to link the systems through standardized interfaces (APIs). With Pega, you can very quickly build a flexible shell over the existing applications. Furthermore, thanks to robotic process automation – RPA, or robotics – we can still integrate applications for which it would no longer be cost-effective to develop such an API. Before, you used to call in a change of address, and on the other end of the line there would be an employee busily copy-pasting to enter your new address in all kinds of systems. Time-consuming and prone to errors. With RPA, this repetitive action is automated: quick and error-free. That way, you can even build a very modern mobile process on a mainframe system.

Curious?

Would you like to know more about our approach? Curious to see what we can do for your company? Contact us without obligation at [email protected] or call us at +31 30 – 20 77 006.