Legacy Modernization is the most discussed topic but what I have been observing is most of it is confined to beautiful decks aka ‘paperware’ which only serves as new ‘shiny toys’ for management. Most of clients have less success with legacy modernization and this comes back every few years as the solution to all the problems the enterprise has.
What I wanted to do in this article is to lay down six key principles that would make legacy modernization a successful program and not just paperware, that needs to be created every few years.
1. Spin-off a new business and Plan for co-existence: Most organizations try to sail on two different boats while trying to change the core system and also supporting current business needs. What we need is a new business which is a greenfield implementation with a separate team working on it so that the team is not doing a balancing act on supporting current vs. future needs
Impact: Reduction in cost and time of 15%
2. Move non-core business first: The risk associated with core business is so high that the buy-in is difficult to come through. A better approach will be to move the non-core business first e.g. move the HR-related systems to SaaS
Impact: Reduction in cost of 15 percent and in time of 10 percent
3. Make it time-bound: Anything that takes more than 12 months to achieve the target state will be deprioritized after the MVP stage as the business need evolves, market conditions change and the business never has an appetite to fund multi-year initiatives
Impact: Reduction in cost and time of 10 percent
4. Enable integrations vs. simplifying the system: The typical approach is rationalization/simplification of the system which takes more time. A better approach would be exposing the current systems via API. This enables the organizations to isolate and identify redundant business functionalities which can be migrated or decommissioned later
Impact: Reductions in cost of 15 percent and in time of 10 percent
5. Prioritize capabilities that deliver value: Always look at delivering value from the customer’s perspective as it will enable end-to-end enablement much faster, than building modern capabilities that don’t serve any immediate customer needs
Impact: Reductions in cost and time of 10 percent
6. Think global, Act local: Many organization allows choices to be made at the local level, an approach that creates more complexities with time. Selecting a global platform that allows local customizations is a better approach.
Impact: Reduction in cost of 10 percent
Some of the more popular approaches, Move to Cloud, Hollow the Core, Microservices-based architecture, Data mesh, and Domain Driven Design, have been deliberately left out of this discussion as they are a topic that needs to be articulated carefully. These approaches need to be tweaked to fit into the above guiding principles. This will enable us to deliver value rather than follow the trend.
if you have been involved in the implementation of similar initiatives with your clients, I would be very keen to hear your experiences with it
* * This article was written by me as part of my Employer’s newsletter