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Lotus Notes Migration: Modernizing Your Applications with Bizagi

Blog: Bizagi Blog

An increasing number of organizations are looking to reduce their dependency on the business collaboration platform as they seek to integrate with the latest APIs. This will help to unlock new digital capabilities, and ultimately improve the efficiency and productivity of their workforce.

But how should you approach migrating to a new platform? Many established organizations have built their digital architecture around Lotus Notes. So they will have years of emails, contacts, and important documents all tied to the workflow application and its database.

The Lotus Legacy

Legacy IT platforms such as Lotus Notes are often the reason that companies struggle to adapt and change their business process models. Couple this with the growing cost of maintenance and the need to migrate becomes apparent: do nothing and you risk demotivated employees, dissatisfied customers, a general lack of innovation and operational inefficiencies.

Many organizations are now looking to migrate to the likes of MS Office and Sharepoint or GSuite to enable them to integrate with their other software tools. But while these platforms are great for personal information management, the more complex, critical applications will need further support to be orchestrated across the entire organization.

Migration from Lotus Notes is often put off due to the fear of a lengthy project as a result of the volume of applications built up over decades. Other organizations are concerned about losing access to information that has been siloed over the years by a lack of connected systems and structures.

But this should be seen as a motivator, not an inhibitor to migration as the siloed information can prevent the business from being agile and responsive to the market. Triaging your applications will uncover a group that are business critical in nature. Now is the time to activate your migration plan.

 

The Benefits of Investing in an Automation Platform:

1 – FOSTER INNOVATION AND AGILITY

In order to thrive in the digital age, organizations need to relentlessly pursue new and innovative products and services. According to Deloitte, 86% of CIOs are looking to bring products to market rapidly while simultaneously modifying product attributes as they refine the offering. While using Lotus Notes, you will be tied to long development cycles. A low-code approach that doesn’t rely so heavily on the IT department is far more favorable at a time when it is important to constantly evolve workflows and processes.

Bizagi helped a company in the chemical manufacturing field who were experiencing a lack of speed to market around new products and services. The global biotechnology company found that their Lotus Notes environment had become complex and costly to maintain due and needed to permeate the silos across the organization to ensure their future competitiveness and speed to market.

By enabling a scalable delivery model, Bizagi created connectivity across the key line of business systems and fully integrated into the company’s backend systems, including SAP. The meant that business users could now be heavily involved in designing the digital processes due to the low-code approach and deploy new products in a timely manner.

 

2 – SERVE YOUR GLOBAL WORKFORCE

For companies that operate at a multinational level, there can be a general lack of cohesion and effectiveness when Lotus Notes and other legacy systems have created organizational silos. This was the case for a renewable energy company who enlisted the help of Bizagi when they wanted to migrate from Lotus Notes.

The company, which applies technology solutions for sustainability in the energy and environment sectors, had very demanding automation and process requirements in order to unite their global workforce who were geographically dispersed. Their siloed information meant it was proving increasingly difficult to orchestrate people, applications, and processes at a global scale.

The Bizagi Digital Process Center of Excellence (CoE) provided governance and guidance while the migration was in place to ensure that everything ran smoothly. Once the new digital architecture was in place it enabled connectivity across a key line of business systems and integration between SAP and PeopleSoft while still supporting the data stored in Lotus Notes.

Over 400 processes were migrated over the course of two years and their new automation layer enabled organization-wide orchestration for a multi-language solution that touched 150 companies who the renewable energy company supported.

 

3 – EMBRACE YOUR SAAS INTEGRATIONS

It’s likely that your organization has invested time and money in SaaS, yet sticking with Lotus Notes could hinder your ability to embrace your new apps as information remains siloed within the Notes system. Locally installed Lotus Notes servers mean that cloud integration is simply not possible, so rather than benefiting from an integrated technology stack, a myriad of disconnected apps just builds up.

This general lack of connectivity, both on-premise and on cloud, only further separates departments who should be working towards the same business process-focused goals. Automation across your IT infrastructure will only be successful if you all your enterprise apps can communicate with each other across their respective silos otherwise, your investment in the likes of Microsoft systems, SAP, Salesforce and the like is a waste of time.

Both the chemical manufacturing company and the renewable energy company mentioned above reaped the benefits of migrating from Lotus Notes when they were able to integrate the business processes to cloud apps including SAP and Peoplesoft, which enabled departments to gain a holistic view of business processes and consequently all work towards the same business goals.

 

How to Avoid the Common Pitfalls of Migration

Don’t be put off the concept of migration by pre-conceived ideas that it’s a  lengthy and costly venture. You just need a map, or rather a model, to follow.

Long-term success in replacing Lotus Notes applications depends on establishing a scalable delivery model which is achieved by creating a Digital Process Center of Excellence (CoE). Bizagi’s approach and methodology are focused on defining the strategy, organizational structure and governance model of your CoE while embedding key process management and automation disciplines within in your team.

This approach will minimize the risks of migrating obsolete applications which have formed part of the Company’s Operating Model. The delivery time of a project of this kind varies between 16-23 weeks, including the deployment of the first applications.

In order to survive and thrive in the digital age, every organization is being forced to change the way they think, innovate and operate. To do that, you need to have the digital agility to try and fail with new processes and being tethered to Lotus Notes may hinder progress. Bizagi can help you tackle migrating these head-on.

So How Bizagi Can Help?

With Bizagi you don’t have to worry about losing any of the information you have saved on Lotus Notes, as Bizagi wraps an agile layer around legacy systems and third-party technology. It connects easily with your existing technologies, so no need to rip and replace. And everything is done through a low-code approach to create an agile system that you can manage with ease.

Support this project with a Center of Excellence, and you’ll be well on your way to digital success. Read our free whitepaper, ‘Building a Digital Process Center of Excellence’ for the four essential steps you need to build yours. By using a CoE approach to digital process management, you can create a culture of collaboration and experimentation across your business and enable an agile approach to delivering a business solution that will help you to deliver rapid results.

You can also find out more in our webinar on the broader topic of ‘How Digital Process Management Enables Business Agility’. Simply sign up for a BrightTalk account if you don’t already have one and watch the video on the player below.

The post Lotus Notes Migration: Modernizing Your Applications with Bizagi appeared first on Bizagi Blog – Ideas for Delivering Digital Transformation.

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