Beyond Digital Transformation – The Legacy Dimension

The pace of technology inevitably means that any organisation over 20 years old will have been through multiple cycles of technological change. As technology develops in rapid cycles, virtually every organisation has at least one component regarded as a legacy. Legacy has different meanings, and that is often one of the challenges. The definition is not sufficiently nuanced to be meaningful. Legacy, in IT terms, is also exclusively negative and yet these older systems contain a treasure trove of data, process and knowledge that can be used to inform future change.

The fundamental problem is that modern software development is often predicated on ‘let’s write something new,’ preferring to rip and replace current systems in favour of something new. This approach significantly extends programme timelines, and so the time to realisation of value becomes ever more extended. The rip-and-replace approach prevents the realisation of incremental gain, and so the organisation often becomes impatient with the programme as it waits for an extended time to see any change.

In our ever-changing world we tend to see replacement as the preferred response to modernise or extend. Every day we see buildings torn down to be replaced with new, modern buildings as sympathetic modernisation of the existing structure is seen as ‘hard’ or ‘requiring compromise.’ We see the same issue with legacy technology and yet, rather as with an old building, there is significant value in retaining some of the original structure and attaching modern elements to it. This enables faster execution and, if done correctly, will enable the modernisation of the original elements at a later, more appropriate time.

When the change does come, it is often massive and poorly managed. And therein lies another problem. ‘Big Bang’ transformations are often followed by a sigh of relief and the belief that ‘we have done transformation so we can pause.’ Witness the flight into the cloud undertaken by so many organisations. Entire infrastructures and eco-systems migrated wholesale into a hyper-scale cloud environment, big complex projects that achieve little more than anything being in a different location.

The Journey To The Cloud  … and back

For many years, we have been hearing of the benefits of cloud computing and the necessity for any modern organisation to adopt cloud–first strategies. We have seen the wholesale lifting of ‘traditional’ IT environments into public cloud environments, often accompanied by promises of transformational change. And yet we are now seeing significant activity in cloud exit, that is, the reversal of the move to the cloud into a move of some or all of it back to localised data centres. Why? The drivers are multiple, but they broadly fall into the category ‘it didn’t deliver the change we expected’ or ‘costs were too high and unpredictable.’

These cloud-first strategies and the wholesale moves are often driven by IT seeking to ensure their platforms are seen as modern, but fundamentally, the issue boils down to putting the same thing somewhere else, and expecting transformational change is irrational. The primary purpose of adopting the cloud must be something beyond simply moving to a different platform. It must deliver value by enabling additional services to the business or reducing operational costs. Or, in an ideal world, both. Unfortunately, many lift and shift exercises fail in both respects, and because these are described as digital transformations, the percentage of failure becomes higher.

Cloud exit is starting to replace cloud first as a strategy in many organisations and this is not helping with the transformational journey. The need to constantly invest in trying to find the ‘right strategy’ is deflecting attention from the change that is really needed. Why are we facing this challenge?

One issue is the advice and guidance available to IT functions. In the UK alone, there are literally thousands of ‘Transformation Consultancies’ ready with their strategic advice and guidance. Look under the covers of these consultancies, and you will find a revenue engine fuelled by the need to migrate organisations quickly and simply to the consultancy’s own preferred cloud solution, whatever that is. They want simple, repetitive migration projects that they can execute quickly before moving on to the next.

How can organisations gain a true value perspective when faced with this?

If the required journey is clearly defined, then using an experienced technical partner to execute a migration, knowing they have the tools and experience, is a good approach. But only if the journey and the attribution of value is clearly defined, and it rarely is, hence the high failure rate.

Returning To The Legacy Question 

Legacy has become such a pejorative word in technology. Many organisations fear their ‘legacy’ will hold them back, especially against their ‘born in the cloud’ challengers, but this is just a matter of perspective. Ripping out what made an organisation successful is counterintuitive. Simply moving it elsewhere, hoping that something will magically change, is pointless. The only effective approach is to explore the current technologies and map them objectively to a desired future state. Never assume what you have today is not fit for purpose for tomorrow.

Yes, there are risks with some older systems, which are many and various, but they are also nuanced and highly complex and should be thoroughly assessed before decisions are made. Having a well-defined long-term strategy will assist this process. Often, ‘legacy’ systems are defined as such because they do not lend themselves to modern access through mobile apps or web-enabled portals, but it is far quicker sometimes to build an external access eco-system than to replace the entire stack. If the eco-system is designed knowing that the legacy will likely be replaced, there are immediate potential gains without a wholesale replacement.

Security is often cited as causing the rush to legacy replacement, but many legacy systems are actually more secure because of their inflexibility and lack of connection to outside services. A secure access layer can deliver great customer experience without compromising the underlying security and remove the need for immediate rip and replace approaches.

There are a large number of extraordinarily successful organisations that project a modern, accessible, app driven approach to customer connection and yet, behind this, is technology that is often decades old but still functions effectively, efficiently and securely. Many of your banking apps and some of the most famous retail apps are simply connecting you to a well-established mainframe system at the core.

Sometimes, the underlying platform is the real issue, and this can be mitigated in several ways while other, more valuable work is executed first. There is also the issue of skills. Some systems are defined as legacy simply because the skills required to support them are in short supply, increasing their risk. Legacy is not a simple thing to define, and the nuance of the definition is important.

Security, patching, the lack of readily available skills are all genuine challenges, but if the transformation journey is correctly planned, then it is possible to address these without simply ripping and replacing and get on with delivering transformational change around them.

Those immediate gains can then be used to fund subsequent replacement.

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