Article
When legacy systems hold the business back
There is a point in a company’s growth where the technology that got you here starts working against you. The system that was fine at ten locations cannot handle fifty. The platform a customer wants to integrate with cannot expose the data. Every new initiative seems to require working around something old. Technology stops being an enabler and becomes the thing the business has to fight.
This is the legacy problem, and it is rarely about one bad system. It is the accumulated weight of years of systems that were never designed for where the company is now.
The cost is not only frustration. McKinsey’s research found that companies carrying the most technical debt are 40 percent more likely to have incomplete or canceled modernization efforts than those carrying the least, and that the companies that manage it well grow revenue meaningfully faster. Old systems do not just slow you down. They make the projects meant to fix them more likely to fail.
Why modernization goes wrong
The instinct, when systems are holding you back, is a big replacement program. Those are also the programs most likely to fail. They try to replace everything at once. They get run as a technology project with no business owner. And no one sequences the work so that value arrives along the way instead of years later.
Modernization that works looks different.
It starts with the business constraint, not the technology. What can the company not do today that it needs to do? That defines what to modernize first, and what to leave alone.
It is incremental. Replace or wrap one capability at a time, with the old and new running side by side, so the business keeps operating while the migration happens underneath it.
It protects operations. In a regulated or high-availability environment, “we modernized but disrupted the business” is a failure even if the new system is better. The plan has to assume the business cannot stop.
It has a business owner who can make tradeoffs. Not just an engineering team working through a wish list.
What I do
I have run a full migration off legacy systems across a fifty-five-location operator without disrupting operations, and modernized through integration and an API-first approach so new systems could connect instead of being rebuilt from scratch. The work was sequenced so the business felt improvement along the way, not a big-bang cutover with its fingers crossed.
If your systems are holding the business back and you are weighing a modernization effort, the highest-value first step is deciding what actually needs to change and in what order. Most of the risk in modernization is in the sequencing, and that is a decision worth getting right before the work starts.
Written by Jon McAnnis, Principal Advisor at Groundwork Technology Advisors.