The challenge many CIOs face is racing to upgrade legacy systems and embrace new working practices while also identifying practices and technologies that are old but still add value to the business. The old maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” often stands true when it comes to modern IT strategy. One of these trends is enterprises’ drive to adopt agile working practices—a shift that can push older toolsets into obsolescence. However, smart CIOs will balance the requirements of the new with retaining older systems, processes, and tools that still add value.
An example of a provider tackling this balancing act is Persistent with its new Jira integration, “Unite for Jira,” which will greatly help companies using IBM’s Engineering Lifecycle Management suite (ELM) to move faster to agile ways of working without having to ditch the wealth they have accumulated in their existing tools. Their software engineering team already known for their integration expertise have come up with this timely new connector to tie the two systems together.
However, there is a problem in this brave new frontier of large enterprises all wanting to be agile and improve their software delivery without seeing costs skyrocketing. All the understanding, data, functionality, and money are invested in existing systems. Many of them are excellent at what they do, but they don’t have the Scrum or Kanban board features required to do agile project management (APM) at scale.
Businesses have two choices: either hope the software vendor comes up with its own flavor of agile management software to integrate with existing systems (but this might not be on their roadmap for some time, if at all) or choose another software tool that provides APM functionality. With both choices, you risk duplication of effort and extra complexity if you can’t get your legacy data to integrate well with the tool you have chosen.
The right partner is critical for CIOs who want to modernize intelligently by maximizing pervious investments as part of this journey.
Persistent has created a solution for one of the most popular engineering and application lifecycle management tools - IBM’s ELM. Persistent’s “Unite for Jira” allows organizations using IBM’s ELM software suite to link all of the components to Jira. It can track, report on, and update cross-platform tasks in one place.
Using Persistent’s connector has several benefits. Jira is recognized as a best-in-class Agile Project Management software tool in the marketplace today. In most cases, where your application lifecycle management (ALM) toolset is very much in the sphere of the technology department, by adding Jira to your system management toolbox you can easily give access to business teams. This means product or requirement owners can easily get an overview of what is happening to their products in one place without having to learn the intricacies of complex ALM tools.
IBM’s ELM isn’t a legacy toolset by any stretch of the imagination, but as enterprises race toward agile ways of working, there will undoubtedly be conflicts between systems that follow more traditional workflows and practices. And while these “traditional” approaches are needed and often essential for some teams, teams also need to align with the newer practices, which is APM today and potentially other approaches in the future. Layering a technical solution over these two approaches is an elegant solution to one that would otherwise bring different cultures into conflict with each other. In this instance, data is the unifying language, and Persistent’s “Unite for Jira” ensures that language flows freely between systems regardless of the business approach.
Exhibit 1: A Logical view of the Unite Connector for Jira
Source: Persistent
The Bottom Line: Smart CIOs will scrutinize the capabilities their partners are bringing to market and work with them to pick which systems to upgrade entirely and which they should retain with a modernized ecosystem around them.
Persistent’s work to merge the new world of agile with more traditional operations toolsets is a good example of a provider working to support enterprises that, instead of writing legacy systems off, choose to keep old systems that still offer value or are too disruptive to replace entirely online. The smart CIOs will be the ones who don’t swallow the transformation pill without thinking. Business operations and IT systems are a complex web of people, processes, and technology. Jumping to new ways of working and hoping for the best isn’t a strategy that will work for large enterprises. Building a clear roadmap that retains or accentuates value from existing toolsets is just as important as implementing new and shiny technology.