Thinking out loud: legacy technology vs. innovation
What we want:
An innovative, market leading digital solution. Think blue sky, bigger picture, make it shiny and solve all our problems.
Meanwhile, under the ‘hood’ of the system…
A Frankenstein monster of different tech solutions, cobbled together to serve multiple, un-prioritised end goals for different users.
You know who rarely has legacy systems? B2C businesses. They can’t afford not to move with the times, as their growth depends on their customers experience.
Why do Companies expect legacy systems to work seamlessly with new tech?
There’s a level of inertia caused by legacy tech. The more you add on to the ‘creature’, the more you create silos and/or breaks in communication between different parts of (what should be) the same tech ecosystem.
- Lack of knowledge/understanding. Not aware that this is even an issue because of a lack of digital knowledge or understanding.
- Lack of funding. It’s too expensive to replace! No one wants to set aside budget for replacing something that ‘isn’t broken’ right now. If we need the system to do anything else, we’ll just cobble something else on.
- Lack of perceived time. We need to fix the thing now, we don’t have time to unpick the tangled web. Reactive, not proactive…and never heard of the saying ‘a stitch in time saves nine’.
- Too many ‘silos’ Really intelligent experts in their field, all working on separate initiatives and projects, with no overall Programme management or overlap. This results in lack of visibility across the multiple work-streams, allowing opportunities to go by undiscovered, and even worse, a lack of information sharing across the team, which results in effort (and cold hard cash) being wasted on duplicates, inefficient solutions, and the ‘incorrect’ problems being solved (solutions are not fit for purpose).
A little list of resources…