Five Mistakes Your Are Probably Making Because of your Legacy Software

As part of selecting a new software system, you might be asked to “pop the bonnet” of your business; to look at your business estate – software and processes – and to start to reflect upon what’s working and what’s not.

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It’s often not until you reach this juncture, that you realise how enmeshed in your legacy system you’ve become.

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It is crucial to take a very honest approach to this exercise and to reflect genuinely about how you can improve, because, you are probably making lots of mistakes as a consequence of your old software.

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Here are the five most common mistakes people are making in their business RIGHT NOW because of legacy systems.

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Mistake #1 We Have Always Done it Like That

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This is probably the most common mistake we come across during software discovery. When analysing a business process, it’s common to come across one or more processes that are not only convoluted and inefficient, but also downright odd. In these cases, when asked “why do you do it that way?” the response is usually “we have always done it that way”; which is really to say, “I don’t know”. Usually if you go back to the root cause it relates to your existing system not functioning the way it should. Or worse, the process was designed several systems ago, and has been copied from system to system because no one considered doing it differently.

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Not adjusting your processes to be more efficient, even though they were set up that way for some legacy software that doesn’t exist anymore, is a mistake you must stop making if you want to succeed.

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Mistake #2 Workarounds

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Another common mistake is that you are still using workarounds, developed for a legacy system you no longer have. A workaround is usually just a temporary measure to provide continuation of business functions – especially critical ones – when your system is unavailable or fails to provide the function. These are typically abandoned once the problem is fixed. However, many organisations simply absorb the manual workaround into their regular business practice, forgetting what drove them to create it in the first place.

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Workarounds (especially manual ones) don’t rely on technology and operate in lieu of a fully functioning system. Any new system you put in should ideally replace any legacy workarounds you have sooked up into your daily or monthly business practice.

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Mistake #3 Making Decisions Based on Lagging Measurements

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Lagging indicators are based on events which have happened already; in other words, the current state of your business – sometimes as of one month ago. Leading measurements are based on the future state of your company and can influence change yet to happen.

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I like to tell a story, because it is the starkest illustration of making decisions based on lagging measurements, I have personally come across. Working for a large PLC, at the end of each month, I had to write some narrative for a board pack explaining the monthly figures. 2% down could be a huge financial loss so when the variances were negative, I had to submit a strategy or plan to mitigate the losses for the remainder of the period. However, (and this one is a doozy) I didn’t?know?what my figures were until the finance team had manually crunched all the numbers and delivered them to me. This would take so long that the figures would be provided a matter of hours before the pack had to be submitted. In practice this meant that the narrative had to be written?in advance?of this and?in anticipation?of the results. I then found myself committed to strategies which may or may not have been applicable simply because there was no space to reflect on the results before having to comment upon them.

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It all sounds preposterous but the software was so antiquated, and the processes so convoluted, that it wasn’t possible to spend time reflecting upon what the business actually needed. So everyone played this game of pretending we knew what was happening and had plans to mitigate and, WORSE, followed it up by designing strategy that was often?incorrect?under the circumstances. Such is the odd process of working for an immovable leviathan of a business.

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These days, most companies are looking ahead using leading KPIs and making business decisions in advance of change to maximise opportunity and mitigate loss – all supported by better software.

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Mistake #4 Retaining Complex Customisations

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When assessing an existing software estate, I often hear “we won’t be getting rid of XXX system because we spent a fortune integrating it into XXX other software”. The sunken cost fallacy prevails!

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Sunk cost fallacy, where companies follow through on endeavours of time, money, or effort, only because they can’t bear to absorb the loss of it, is a purely emotional and irrational business decision. When costs cannot be recovered, it is easy to see abandoning the legacy software as a waste of money. It can also seem like a waste of spend to invest further into a new system. This is flawed business logic. If a new system will give you better results, it might be a safer or cheaper option to retreat. Evaluate the worth of the new software in relation to the potential outcomes, not the potential loss of money already spent.

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Mistake #5 Job Protectionism – Change Management

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I once worked with someone whose entire job was to fix the giant spreadsheet which every business department fed into, and upon which the business results were analysed.

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Let that sink in…..It was an actual, full-time job. Spreadsheet fixer.

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I’ve also worked in an organisation where the legacy software was so old that only one member of staff remained who could be classed as a superuser. That person had been employed by the company for over 30 years and for the last 15 of those had been the only system administrator of our antiquated, on premise,?booking software system. These people become so relied upon that they can literally never leave, often becoming over paid and sometimes, overworked.

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You should never allow a legacy system to threaten operations by creating a single point of failure. Instead, make sure your system is modern and well furnished with user enabled training manuals and videos.

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Written by Emma Stewart – Sales & Marketing Director at CloudTamers

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To learn more about how NetSuite can modernise your business;?get in touch

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