Legacy systems do not happen by accident.
They often result from feature-driven development, unintentional technical debt, organization acquisitions, reorganizations, and ever-evolving technologies.
The obvious solution to some would definitely be to transform the outdated legacy system and implement a completely new system. This process, however, looks quite scary, since it takes a long time, costs a lot of money and uses the resources reserved for other assets.
Because of all these challenges, companies can become trapped by their outdated systems and overwhelmed by the thought of transforming them. While these are all very valid reasons, organizations generally overlook what issues await them if they don’t transform legacy systems.
Issues of Legacy Systems
Many organizations struggle with legacy systems that (poorly) work. These systems are slow, fragile, heavily customized, and badly documented. Such visible issues are often recognized by organizations. However, there are also less apparent problems that indirectly stem from these legacy systems, complicating their impact on overall business operations. Let's look at a few examples:
Business impact
Operational inefficiencies delay projects and reduce productivity, while missed opportunities for growth and innovation hinder competitiveness. Technical challenges increase maintenance costs, and difficulties in maintaining industry standards can lead to compliance risks. Outdated systems frustrate employees, affecting talent retention, and negatively impact customer satisfaction, which in turn harms the business's reputation. Overall, these issues limit a business's ability to adapt and thrive in a competitive market.
Security threats
Inadequate documentation and lack of technical support make legacy systems vulnerable to security breaches and legal issues. This is especially risky in regulated areas like med-tech and fin-tech, where cyberattacks can lead to severe consequences, including data breaches, loss of sensitive information, and damage to the company's reputation. Additionally, legacy systems often lack advanced security measures such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and advanced firewalls, which are nowadays becoming an essential part of company security requirements.
Usability challenges
Legacy systems often have clunky, non-intuitive interfaces that frustrate users, making tasks more cumbersome and time-consuming. They lack modern user-friendly features like touch interfaces, intuitive navigation, and real-time feedback, which hampers productivity and efficiency, leading to a steeper learning curve and reduced user satisfaction.
In conclusion, the issues associated with legacy systems extend far beyond their visible flaws. We believe there are 5 vital steps which every company should take in consideration when trying to transform their legacy hardware or software systems.
5 Steps to Change
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to tackling legacy systems, knowing a few common approaches can help you make informed decisions.
“When considering making a change, it's important to keep in mind that change can be hard.”
Changes should be implemented slowly and gently because people tend to form emotional attachments to products, even bad ones. Expect a lot of attention, skepticism, doubts, fears, and concerns from your colleagues during this process.
Step 1: Thoroughly research the current legacy system and analyze it from five different angles: desirability, viability, feasibility, sustainability, responsibility. We suggest following a goal-directed design process. Invest extra time in this step to speed up the other steps in the process.
Step 2: Establish trust and relationships for buy-in early in the project from users, stakeholders, and engineers. For example: run pilot tests with smaller groups during the design process (prototypes are your best friends). Have regular review meetings with stakeholders and engineers where you collect feedback (useful and not useful) and make collective decisions.
Step 3: Choose a technical strategy, based on your research:
Encapsulation: This involves extending the legacy system by encapsulating its data and functions and making them available as services via an API. This allows for the integration of new capabilities without altering the legacy system.
Rehosting: Also known as "lift and shift," this strategy involves moving applications from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud environment with minimal changes. It provides immediate benefits of cloud infrastructure without altering the core application.
Replatforming: This involves making some optimizations to the application to take better advantage of the new platform, such as moving a database to a managed cloud service, while keeping the core architecture unchanged.
Refactoring: This strategy involves restructuring and optimizing existing code without changing its external behavior. It improves non-functional attributes like performance, maintainability, and scalability.
Rearchitecting: This is a more extensive transformation, where the application's architecture is altered to better align with modern environments, such as transitioning from a monolithic to a microservices architecture.
Rebuilding: This involves discarding the old system and redeveloping the application from scratch using modern technologies and practices. This provides the highest level of flexibility but also involves the most effort and risk.
Replacing: In this strategy, the old system is replaced entirely with a new system, often a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution or a SaaS product. It can quickly bring in new capabilities but may require significant changes in business processes.
Also, select an approach that best fits your needs. There are two:
The revolutionary approach, or "rebuild and replace," involves completely replacing the legacy system with a new one. This is typically necessary when the existing system poses significant risks, such as severe security vulnerabilities that can no longer be managed.
The evolutionary approach is a more gradual, safer way to modernize, breaking the process into stages to minimize disruption and risk. However, if drawn out too long, this method can end up addressing symptoms rather than resolving the underlying issues.
Step 4: Inform and train users when adopting a new system as it reduces adoption resistance, boosts efficiency, minimizes errors, and ensures consistent and standardized use across the organization. For the best and seamless transition include informing them about the changes well in advance, providing thorough, hands-on training sessions, preparing detailed manuals or guidelines and supporting them in the transition phase of the process.
Step 5: Continuously improve. To ensure the system remains effective, it's important to make ongoing improvements and regular updates (ensure that you have a dedicated team with the resources available). This helps address issues, keeps the system secure, and incorporates user feedback for a better experience. Ultimately, this maximizes ROI (return on investment) by ensuring the system adapts and remains valuable over time. If this step isn't addressed, you could end up with another legacy system.
Our experience
One of our client, an IoT company, enlisted our help to improve a previously developed ‘user sign in’ functionality. Our primary task was to identify critical legacy issues that needed transformation. We needed to extract parts of their working modules and adapt them to a new solution, due to their inability to meet client’s business needs or adhere to modern technical standards.
Throughout the project, we focused on making sure the rewritten code supported the legacy code. Our goal was to make certain that the new system performed the same tasks and produced the same results as the original, without any loss of features or capabilities. This careful attention to detail was crucial for maintaining continuity and reliability in the system’s operations.
Our team implemented a Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication method, simplifying the login process and reducing user friction. This enhancement has improved the conversion rate and lowered the churn rate. With our support, the client now enjoys a secure, seamless, and worry-free service without the expense of managing multiple authentication routes and databases across various platforms.
If you're looking to transform your legacy system efficiently, without compromising functionality, we offer a comprehensive 4-week pre-study designed to guide you through the process. Starting with an in-depth workshop, we'll work closely with you to develop a functional, testable prototype.
Reach out to us to discover how we can assist you in this important step.
