If you’ve ever wondered why some of the largest corporations can’t seem to keep up with the digital experiences provided by companies like Apple, Google and Amazon, the answer may very well lay in legacy systems. These bulky, archaic systems prevent many corporations from accessing the data and analytics required to keep pace with modern user and business needs.
The Nature of the Problem
Changes required by business processes quickly become too expensive due to the sheer size, complexity and inflexible design of the legacy systems.
Thanks to the fast pace of technology, the capabilities that organizations want to be supported by ERP and other systems of record have changed immensely from their original purpose and expected usage. There has been a trend in business to implement ERP and other standard systems of record with company-specific customizations and modifications. But often, the architecture of “legacy systems” proves inflexible, and reliably adapting these systems as businesses evolve is not economically feasible. Where IT should be an enabler of business process change, ERP and other legacy systems have proven to be disablers.
The problem is that the changes required by business processes quickly become too expensive due to the sheer size, complexity and inflexible design of the legacy systems. Large subsystems used to periodically require the extension of their functionality in the form of well-structured, release-oriented projects with narrow requirements and small user bases. The nature of today’s business, by comparison, requires that new functionality is developed in a matter of days and that it impacts a wide array of the people who use the related systems and data.
Another aspect of the problem is its sheer scope versus the pace of change. Obviously legacy systems are comprised of technology, which includes computers, programs, databases, networks and other hardware and software. But legacy systems must also be supported with unique people/skills, data and company-specific business process knowledge, all of which are also expected to evolve. Many businesses don’t consider this additional degree of complexity that exists around their organizational complexity.
Old legacy systems are also heavily interconnected with other systems. Therefore, parts of one legacy system cannot be altered without breaking other systems that integrate with its process and data. In fact, a change to one component might require (often unanticipated/undocumented) changes to most, if not all, of the components of other systems.
The Approach to Enable Flexibility around Inflexible Legacy Systems
Enabling the extension of legacy systems and data sources to new UIs through APIs is a good start.
To evolve, legacy systems must be extended, wrapped, or replaced to be more flexible, accessible, user-friendly and affordable. Defining real and current business needs—specifically, how to capture competitive differentiation of business processes—is crucial to solving the change problem. Understanding and mapping of those business needs down to the information and interactions level, along with opportunities to separate concerns, is the first step to creating flexible software architectures around legacy systems of record.
A flexible integration architecture is another part of the solution. Enabling the extension of legacy systems and data sources to new UIs through APIs is a good start. More and more legacy application vendors are also realizing that they must enable their products to be open to extension by outside sources. A second part of the strategy should recognize legacy data, its value and quality (good and bad). Business are discovering great business value and remedying potential exposures by managing the quality of legacy data.
Investing in legacy IT and a surrounding architecture that’s capable of evolving with business needs is possible, but projects must be approached at timescales, business value and costs that are appropriate to the business. This is a difficult, but highly worthwhile balance. It’s essential that business and IT have transparency to the architecture and implementation roadmap, engineering tradeoffs, functional tradeoffs, potential business impacts, unknowns and risks.
Bottom Line
Legacy systems were not built to provide many companies with the flexibility needed to carry out many of the modern needs and customizable capabilities businesses need as they grow and change. As a result, businesses without flexible system architectures cannot leverage data or analytics, nor can they gain ground to compete with new efficient, agile, innovative business processes.
To engage today’s customers, your business must exploit the ever-growing ecosystem of web, mobile and sensor devices, APIs and data. Using agile approaches, the web solutions and web application development teams at Summa work closely with clients, designers and integration experts to create workable, innovative solutions quickly. To learn more about legacy systems and solutions, contact us here.
