Reducing Technical Debt for a Sustainable Future
Learn how Vervint partnered with a leading Midwestern retailer to untangle a technology environment that had grown out of necessity: reducing technical debt and creating a streamlined, strategic plan for future success.
What We Did
The client encountered repeated disruptions across their tech stack which negatively impacted service, continuity, and customer experience. Our technical debt and infrastructure modernization team conducted a thorough assessment of their tech environment to diagnose issues and recommend a remediation strategy that aligned business and technical goals.
cloud solutions
Digital Transformation
data center
Lowering Costs
Creating more efficient systems to control costs on a long-term basis.
Reducing Downtime
Building reliability into the tech environment reduced unplanned outages and downtime.
Improving CX
Optimizing technology focused on creating a reliable, efficient, seamless online experience for customers.
About the Client
The client is one of the largest privately-owned retailers in the U.S., operating a chain of supercenter stores located primarily in the Midwest. After the rapid growth required during the pandemic, the company needed a strategic review of its tech stack with the focus on managing technical debt, making the most of their existing technology investments and laying the foundation for a successful future.
Insights: Digital Change
Digital change must be a deliberate, strategic, and meaningful transformation that paves the way for growth and innovation.
Assessing Current State with an Eye on Managing Technical Debt
In 2020, like many retailers, our client was under enormous pressure to pivot to the drastically changed, highly competitive world of a retail organization during COVID. During that time the company began to roll out new features and functionality as quickly as possible. And while this satisfied short-term needs, eventually, the company was left with a disjointed, application-dense environment that lacked documentation and strategic optimization.
A few years later, the company was experiencing ongoing technology issues that were disrupting service and negatively impacting customer experience. With applications and processes divided between on-premise and cloud environments, and a mixture of features and functions without documentation and analysis, it was difficult for the client to complete root cause analysis of issues. This meant that not only were disruptions occurring, but that the same issues were repeated over and over, as the root cause was difficult to determine.
The company needed a full assessment of existing tech and recommendations for streamlining, improving system stability and functionality, reducing technical debt and creating the foundation for a resilient, scalable future state.
The client was looking to optimize technology – making the most of the investment that they had already made, while paving the way for accelerated velocity, improved customer experience, and lower costs.
Improving reliability of the tech environment helped create a system that was resilient, scalable and performant, and which led to a better customer experience.
Understanding the Current State
Vervint conducted an in-depth, three-week assessment of the client’s technology environment — both on-premise and cloud — to learn what the company had, how it worked, and how it could be improved.
First, our team took stock of the technical documentation to gain a basic understanding of the environment.
Then, we conducted stakeholder interviews, we they could ask both general and specific questions of the business and technology teams.
After, our team requested read-only access to the client’s systems, so that we could explore the technology and uncover any undocumented dependencies between applications and processes.
Service: IT Architecture
Design a dynamic IT architecture that maximizes efficiency and scales with your business.
Building a Roadmap to Reduce Technical Debt
We provided the client with a findings document that included detailed recommendations for improving the technological environment for the company, with an eye toward lowering costs, increasing functionality, and providing a better customer experience.
The findings document included a roadmap for improvement with specific, prioritized action items that aligned business and technology objectives in a single strategy.
Vervint has the experience, imagination, and technical expertise to help your company make the most of technology to get the most from its people and provide the best to its customers. Contact Vervint today to learn more about the benefits of reducing technical debt and improving infrastructure modernization at your organization.
