09 | 2024 Olli Laine, Kipinä Co-founder & CEO
Technology is evolving faster than ever while challenges themselves grow more complex. Regardless of the industry, the significance of high-quality technological solutions as an enabler of success is undeniable. When core business operations and IT intersect in daily practice, a diverse array of challenges quickly emerges, the resolution of which becomes critical for a company's growth, competitiveness, and operational reliability.
At Kipinä, our experts encounter these common ‘digital pitfalls’ daily, so I decided to use this blog to present the most typical challenges in the technology environment and targeted solutions, with concrete examples, to smooth the path of technology development in a sustainable way.
1. Old legacy systems are being outpaced by modern requirements.
One of the most common technology challenges we encounter is companies' legacy, business-critical systems. As the name implies, these systems were rarely designed to scale or integrate into today's digital ecosystem. They are inherently rigid, expensive to maintain, and adopting new innovations alongside them—such as AI or mobile solutions—is particularly challenging and costly.
Digital pitfall:
A rapidly growing construction company constantly finds itself stumbling over a massive amount of manual work in both shift scheduling and task planning.
Kipinä's solution:
In many cases, there is an underlying need to expand or replace the existing legacy ERP system with a modern architecture and cloud-based solutions. ERP modernization brings AI-enabled agility and cost savings while providing the flexibility required for future updates and integrations.
2. Outdated infrastructure as a brake on growth
As businesses grow, digital infrastructure should actively support that growth. Without an appropriate technical foundation, such as cloud infrastructure or modern service architecture, our clients often begin to encounter various performance issues. As just one example, an e-commerce platform may crash during a major traffic surge if scalability has not been considered in the digital architecture.
Digital pitfall:
An internationally operating e-commerce platform crashes during a sudden traffic surge, jeopardizing the customer experience.
Kipinä's solution:
Through architectural assessments with many of our clients, we have arrived at solutions where software and data architectures are built for high performance, incorporating cloud services such as AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancers. These digital solutions enable dynamic scaling according to business needs, allowing systems to respond to traffic spikes without downtime or performance degradation.
3. Communication breakdowns in complex system integrations
The digital architectures of many of our clients are built from numerous disparate systems that, much like an aging couple, fail to communicate adequately with one another. This 'communication gap' quickly leads to data silos, manual processes, and sluggish decision-making. Consequently, business-critical systems fail to share real-time data, resulting in compromised data quality.
Digital pitfall:
A major global corporation's financial management system lacks real-time connectivity with its customer relationship management (CRM) platform, making budget tracking cumbersome.
Kipinä's solution:
In some cases, our architectural assessments have enabled us to introduce integration architecture and tools between inefficiently operating systems, creating an API gateway between different environments. This allows for real-time data transfer between custom solutions, mobile applications, ERP, and CRM systems, making business processes even more efficient and automated.
4. Information security and cyber threats in applications and architecture
Corporate cybersecurity is one of today's most critical challenges. Escalating cyber threats, such as data breaches, information leaks, and DDoS attacks, can inflict severe damage on a business in the worst-case scenario. Complex legacy systems, their maintenance, or standard software development practices may leave vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Digital pitfall:
A mid-sized listed company handles vast amounts of security-sensitive data and customer information daily. The risk of a data breach is recognized within the company as a significant business threat.
Kipinä's solution:
An architecture audit is the most effective way to uncover potential cyber threats lurking beneath the surface. Tailored solutions may include updating the software architecture or implementing a Zero Trust architecture, which enables continuous verification for all users and devices. Solutions can also leverage tools such as AWS Shield to protect services against DDoS attacks.
5. Ongoing maintenance and updates are costly and slow
Ongoing maintenance and updates for disparate systems typically consume significant time, resources, and capital. Existing technical debt usually exacerbates the situation further. The end result is a software ecosystem that slows down time-to-market for new features and exposes systems to errors introduced by manual updates.
Digital pitfall:
A digital service concept is utilized by thousands of consumer customers, and the company is concerned that an upcoming update will cause downtime, preventing customers from using the services seamlessly.
Kipinä's solution:
We enable continuous software updates without downtime through modern architecture, the implementation of CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) processes, and automated testing, empowering our clients to remain competitive and react rapidly to changing market demands.
6. Deficiencies in data infrastructure hinder the potential unlocked by artificial intelligence
Many of our client companies are sitting on 'cabinets full of data', yet their capability to effectively analyze and leverage this data is often limited. As a result, data quality rapidly deteriorates when data architecture and governance are not designed proactively. This acts as a direct bottleneck, preventing companies from making data-driven decisions and capitalizing on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning.
Digital pitfall:
An e-commerce platform offering tens of thousands of distinct articles across multiple countries feels it lacks the ability to accurately forecast and consequently develop successful campaigns based on factual data.
Kipinä's solution:
Data architecture management and modern cloud-based data platforms, such as Snowflake, provide our clients with powerful tools for data collection and analysis. A well-designed architecture, high data quality, and optimized processes—planned through an architecture audit—enable advanced analytics, machine learning, and generative AI to be harnessed for business advantage.
7. The lack of a experimentation culture
Agile methodologies, a culture of experimentation, and DevOps practices are key to driving rapid innovation and software development for Kipinä's clients. Frequently, the core challenge lies in adopting and effectively implementing these methodologies—which remain unfamiliar to many Finnish companies—ultimately slowing down the time-to-market for new software and services.
Digital pitfall:
The new generation of a long-standing family-owned business has developed novel software critical to the company's future competitiveness, yet the internal organizational culture fails to support the agile approach required for a time-critical launch.
Kipinä's solution:
Integrating agile development and a culture of experimentation into digital development is embedded in the DNA of every expert we employ. By understanding our clients' digital structures, we can execute all software development in a data-driven manner, integrating powerful DevOps methodologies and precise tooling into the process. This accelerates release cycles and ensures that new software is deployed both agilely and reliably.
If you suspect your company is standing on the edge of a pitfall, Kipinä's architecture audit provides clarity and delivers precisely tailored solutions suited to your enterprise.
Digital pitfalls can conceal a multitude of challenges that slow down business development, incur financial costs, and, in the worst-case scenario, introduce critical cybersecurity risks.
Through carefully designed digital architectures, we at Kipinä tackle these challenges with a team of 40 top-tier digital development professionals and a 200-strong ecosystem, supporting the growth and competitiveness of our client companies. Modern technologies, such as cloud services, integration tools, security architectures, and agile development processes, are key to overcoming these challenges.
Architecture audits allow us to dive deep into each client's digital structures and the technical issues, operational challenges, and root causes within them, providing recommendations based on industry best practices and our extensive experience. An architecture audit delivers an honest, technology-agnostic overview for corporate IT leadership, along with a clear roadmap for moving forward efficiently. With our architecture audits, our clients no longer need to experience anxiety amidst uncertainty or reinvent the wheel. Get in touch, and let's take a look under the hood together! Welcome to Kipinä!
Olli Laine, Kipinä Co-founder & CEO
The author is a visionary in the future of Finnish digital development, a passionate advocate of data-driven management, and one of the co-founders of Kipinä Software. In addition to his role as CEO, he wears a strong orienteer's headlamp and holds the credentials of an avid cross-country skier.