How does an optimized Software Landscape look like?

In the age of digitization, you cannot expect to grow your business without implementing a robust software solution within your organization. Having a highly responsive software solution at your disposal allows you to leverage your business processes and attain your key business goals.

However, simply implementing a software application within your organization is never enough. Businesses need to ensure that the software landscape of their organization is optimized. An optimized software increases the engagement, performance, and productivity of your team. The process of optimizing a software landscape starts right from the beginning of software engineering and goes on even after the application is deployed.

Before understanding how an optimized software landscape looks, let us briefly have a look at what software optimization means.

What Is Software Optimization?

In simple words, software optimization is a set of practices dedicated to ensuring the optimum performance of a software landscape within your organization. It concerns using your software landscape in the best way possible.

People often confuse optimization with making the maximum use of a software landscape. It is important to understand that software landscape optimization isn’t always about using an application to its maximum limit. It is about understanding the scope of your organization, carrying out suitable software engineering, and making the most of the software landscape you have at your disposal. At times, software optimization may also be about restricting or minimizing the use of your software landscape in the interest of your organization.

Optimizing your software landscape requires you to take into consideration a range of different factors regarding the performance of your enterprise software landscape, such as speed, efficiency, usage of resources, and much more. Ideally, an optimal software landscape provides you with high efficiency while utilizing the right amount of resources at the right cost. Working on an optimized software landscape is beneficial for the holistic growth of your organization.

Optimization is often considered to be an organization’s greatest weapon against poor software performance, sub-standard features, and unwanted depreciation. It helps you extract the best possible benefits from software engineering based on the business goals and objectives you had set out to achieve.

Why Does An Optimized Software Landscape Matter?

You cannot afford to sustain yourself in the market by compromising on the performance of your software landscape. The performance of your software solutions and applications is directly connected to the performance of an organization as a whole.

In the age of digitization, most (if not all) of the business processes carried out by an organization are dependent on its software landscape. Right from managing leads to marketing their offerings to handling financial accounts and providing personalized customer support, you need a robust software application for everything.

In such a situation, if your enterprise software landscape itself is not performing up to the mark, you and your team members are bound to face the consequences of the same. An optimized software landscape prevents you from making any unwanted compromises when it comes to the performance of your business and allows you to uphold the standard of your processes.

Moreover, an optimized software landscape gives you a competitive advantage in the market. While the competition across all industries is only getting more intense over time, it has become more important than ever for businesses to have an edge over their competitors. Optimizing your software landscape is the key to standing out from the clutter and offering services that no other business operating in the market provides.

Measuring the performance of your Software Landscape

To optimize your enterprise software landscape, it is important to measure its performance on a regular basis. This helps you understand the areas where you can improve and see the results of optimizing your software landscape.

Whenever measuring the performance of a software application is talked about, a lot of discussions revolve around the speed of the application. Naturally, pages that load faster provide a better user experience, thereby improving the overall performance of the application. The speed of a software application is so important that Google has ended up factoring load speed into its ranking algorithm.

Even when it comes to analyzing the performance of complex software landscapes where factors like back-end database queries, UI/UX and other factors are focused on, speed still holds the pivotal spot in analyzing performances. Modern applications are capable of delivering page load speeds that are as fast as 0.1 seconds. Unwanted delays in loading pages and performing tasks would put the users off the concerned application and steer them away from the same.

How Does An Optimized Software Landscape Look Like?

The standards of optimizing the enterprise software landscape have gotten considerably higher. You can no longer expect to get good traction by implementing a sub-standard software solution.

Here are some of the most important attributes an optimized software landscape should have:

1. A Well-researched Scope Of The Problem

Every software landscape is designed to resolve a specific problem faced by an organization. To optimize an enterprise software landscape, it is important to have a well-researched scope of the problem it is tackling.

Conducting thorough research on the scope of your problem allows you to add the right tools or features and enhance the existing ones in the interest of your business. Without meditating on the problem your software solution has set out to resolve, you cannot optimize its performance and obtain the desired results.

2. Best Standards And Practices For Coding

The increasing prominence of low-code applications has made people assume that coding does not hold the importance it used to a few years ago. However, that is not the case. Along with the speed of your software application, its code plays an important role in defining the performance of your software landscape.

An optimized landscape will never take coding for granted. It would involve the use of the most suitable programming frameworks and languages during the process of custom software engineering. Robust coding allows you to make your software landscape future-proof and enhances the results obtained from the same.

3. Optimized UX

Ultimately, a software landscape is optimized to provide a better user experience to your employees or customers. An optimized software landscape will use the right visual and psychological cues while designing the UX for an application.

Here are some highly effective UX optimization techniques used by developers around the world to optimize their software landscape:

4. Progress Percentages And Bars

As trivial as it may seem, this nominal technique helps you optimize the UX of your application to a great extent. Adding progress bars that show the percentage of a task completed or an update being installed allows users to set realistic expectations instead of waiting cluelessly.

5. Progressive Page Loads

Another highly efficient way of optimizing the UX of your application or website is to use progressive page loading techniques like “lazy loading.” These techniques load the top portion of the pages first, followed by the rest of the page.

This prevents users from waiting until the entire page is loaded and helps them view content as they keep scrolling through the page. If you are having issues with your page loading speed, you can always resort to such progressive loading techniques to optimize your software landscape.

6. Progressive Images

Just like page loads, you can also carry out progressive loading of images on your web applications to optimize the user experience. Here, your application would load rough thumbnails of the images first before high-resolution results are loaded. This gives users an idea about the content and the images therein before they witness the complete images.

7. Ongoing Software Landscape Optimization

An optimized enterprise software landscape will always be a “work in progress”. The effective approach to follow while optimizing your software landscape is to keep following through with the results and making necessary changes in the interest of your business.

Keeping the core purpose and problem in mind, conduct multiple follow-ups as you optimize your software landscape. Keep track of the performance and identify the areas that need to be worked upon. Based on these results, continue the optimization process to keep enhancing your software landscape.

8. In Sync With The Ongoing Trends

One of the biggest attributes of an optimized software landscape is that it is in sync with the ongoing market trends and technological advancements in the industry.

We live in an age where new trends emerge frequently, requiring the software landscapes across the board to be in sync with the same. An optimized landscape would also stay upgraded and relevant in the market it is operated in.

The Final Word

These were some of the many qualities an optimized software landscape should have. In the age of immense competition and digitization, you need to keep your IT infrastructure and software solutions optimized to sustain your business in the market and establish healthy relationships with all stakeholders. Irrespective of the scale at which you operate and the industry you belong to, always make sure that you keep optimizing your software landscape to attain the desired business objectives.