Avoid digital bottlenecks: clarity and solutions to common technology challenges with architecture assessments
09 | 2024 Olli Laine, Kipinä Co-founder & CEO
Technology is evolving faster than ever before, while the challenges themselves are becoming more complex. Whatever the industry, the importance of quality technology solutions as an enabler of success is undeniable. When business itself and IT come together in day-to-day operations, a diverse set of challenges very often emerge, the resolution of which quickly becomes critical to 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 technological challenges we encounter is companies' old, business-critical systems – so-called legacy systems. As the name suggests, these systems are rarely designed to scale or integrate with today's digital ecosystem. They are inflexible in nature, expensive to maintain, and particularly challenging and costly to implement alongside new innovations such as artificial intelligence or mobile solutions.
Digital pitfall:
A fast-growing construction company is constantly finding itself bogged down by a huge amount of manual work, both in scheduling shifts and planning tasks.
Kipinä's solution:
In many cases, the underlying need is to expand or replace an existing legacy ERP system with modern architecture and cloud-based solutions. Modernizing the ERP system brings with it the agility and cost savings enabled by artificial intelligence, as well as flexibility for future updates and integrations.
2. Old infrastructure as a brake on growth
As companies' business operations grow, digital infrastructure should specifically support this growth. Without an appropriate technical foundation, such as cloud infrastructure or modern service architecture, our customers often begin to encounter various performance issues. One example of this is an online store, which can crash during a large spike in traffic if scalability has not been taken into account in the digital architecture.
Digital pitfall:
An internationally operating online store crashes during a rapid spike in visitor traffic, jeopardizing the customer experience.
Kipinä's solution:
Through architectural mapping, we have worked with many of our customers to develop solutions in which software and data architecture are built to be "performance-oriented," utilizing cloud services such as AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancer. These digital solutions enable dynamic scaling according to business needs, allowing systems to respond to user spikes without service interruptions or performance issues. These digital solutions enable dynamic scaling according to business needs, allowing systems to respond to user spikes without downtime or performance issues.
3. Poor communication of complex system integrations
Many of our customers' digital architectures are built from a number of different systems that, like an old married couple, don't talk to each other enough. This 'communication challenge' quickly leads to information fragmentation, manual processes and slow decision-making. Business-critical systems therefore do not share information in real time, making data quality poor.
Digital pitfall:
The financial management system of a large global company is not connected in real time to the customer relationship management (CRM) system, making it difficult to monitor budgeting.
Kipinä's solution:
In some cases, architectural mapping has enabled us to introduce integration architecture and tools between inefficient systems, creating a so-called API gateway between different systems. This enables real-time data transfer between customized solutions, mobile applications, ERP, and CRM systems, making business processes more efficient. This enables real-time data transfer between customized solutions, mobile applications, ERP, and CRM systems, making business processes more efficient and automated.
4. Security and cyber threats to applications and architecture
Corporate information security is one of the most critical challenges facing businesses today. Increasing cyber threats such as data breaches, data leaks and DDoS attacks can, in the worst case, cause extensive damage to business. Complex legacy systems and their maintenance or software development practices can leave gaps that can be exploited by attackers.
Digital pitfall:
A medium-sized listed company handles huge amounts of security-sensitive data and customer information on a daily basis. The company recognises the risk of a data breach as a significant business threat.
Kipinä's solution:
Architecture mapping is the best way to identify potential cyber threats lurking beneath the surface. Customized solutions may include updating the software architecture or, for example, implementing a Zero Trust architecture, which allows us to introduce the principle of continuous authentication of all users and devices for our customers. Solutions such as AWS Shield, which protects services from DDoS attacks, can be utilized.
5. Ongoing maintenance and upgrading is expensive and slow
Continuous maintenance and updates of different systems tend to take up a lot of time, resources, and money. Previous technical debt typically exacerbates the situation. The end result is a system that slows down the introduction of new features to the market and exposes systems to errors caused by manual updates.
Digital pitfall:
Thousands of consumer customers use the service concept based on the digital solution, and the company fears that the upcoming update will cause an interruption in service, preventing customers from using the services without worry.
Kipinä's solution:
We enable continuous software updates without service interruptions through modern architecture, the implementation of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) processes, and automated testing, allowing our customers to remain competitive and respond quickly to changing market demands.
6. Data infrastructure gaps are holding back the potential of AI
Many of our clients have 'cupboards full of data', but the ability to analyse and use this data effectively is often limited. As a result, the quality of data quickly starts to fall short when the data architecture or its management is not designed in advance. This acts as a direct brake, preventing companies from making data-driven decisions and exploiting new technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning.
Digital pitfall:
An online store offering tens of thousands of different items to different countries finds that it is unable to predict and thus develop successful campaigns based on facts.
Kipinä's solution:
Data architecture management and new cloud-based data platforms, such as Snowflake, provide our customers with powerful tools for collecting and analyzing data. A sensible architecture designed with the help of architecture mapping, data quality, and processes enable advanced analytics and machine learning, as well as the harnessing of generative artificial intelligence for the benefit of business.
7. Lack of experimental culture
Agile methodologies, a culture of experimentation and DevOps practices are key to driving rapid innovation and software development for Kipina's customers. Often the challenge is to adopt and effectively implement these methods, which are foreign to many Finnish companies, and this in itself ends up slowing down the introduction of new software and services to the market.
Digital pitfall:
A new generation of a long-established family-owned company has developed new software that will play a critical role in the company's future competitiveness, but the internal culture does not support an agile approach to enabling time-critical launches.
Kipinä's solution:
Bringing agile development and a culture of experimentation to digital development is in the DNA of every one of our experts. When we understand our customers' digital structures, we can make all software development data-driven, bringing efficient DevOps methods and just the right tools into the process. This allows us to speed up release cycles and ensure that new software releases are agile and reliable.
If you suspect that your company is standing on the edge of a precipice, Kipinä's architectural survey will provide clarity and the right solutions for your company.
Digital silos can present a multitude of challenges that slow down business development, cost money and, in the worst case, pose critical security risks.
With carefully designed digital architectures, we at Kipinä tackle these challenges with the help of 40 top digital development professionals and an ecosystem of 200 people, supporting the growth and competitiveness of our client companies. Modern technologies such as cloud services, integration tools, information security architectures, and agile development processes play a key role in overcoming these challenges.
Through architectural surveys , we delve deep into each customer's digital structures and the technical problems, operational challenges, and root causes that arise in them, offering recommendations based on best practices in the field and our experience. Architecture mapping provides you with a technology-independent, honest picture of your company's IT management and a clear roadmap for moving forward efficiently. With our architecture mapping, our customers no longer need to worry about uncertainty or try to reinvent the wheel themselves. Contact us, and let's see what's under the hood together! Welcome to Kipinä!
Olli Laine, Kipinä Co-founder & CEO
The author is one of the visionaries of the future of Finnish digital development, a passionate advocate of data-driven leadership and one of the co-founders of Kipinä Software. In addition to his CEO hat, he wears an orienteer's headlamp and a skier's hat.