A Strategy to Put a Fresh Face on Older Technology

Remember when "Y2K" issue was all the rage? The threat of a system failure due to storing a two-digit year spurred a tremendous amount of investment in IT platforms. A few years later the dawn of the Internet spurred a tremendous amount of growth and a jump from client-server technology to thin client platforms.

Today, the world is now embracing cloud and SaaS solutions, a new resurgence in IT spending is occurring. However the legacy systems purchased during the early part of the century are now making modernization efforts difficult to achieve. These systems have become so mission critical that replacing them can be extremely disruptive to the business. So much so, that the price tag to migrate to newer platforms is often measured in the tens of millions of dollars.

The software industry isn't helping either. Nearly all of the current engineering investment is going towards developing newer, more modern applications designed for the cloud. This means investment in their legacy products have slowed to a crawl or in some cases, come to a complete stop. Many software vendors are now threatening to remove support for these older systems in an attempt to improve their margins.

Rapidly changing business conditions will continuously force organizations to implement change - therefore adopting strategies to enable this change in the least disruptive means possible is hugely important. We suggest a strategy that is geared for a "Crawl", "Walk", "Run" approach that matures as the organization matures and balances risk with reward in a more favorable way versus the traditional "Big Bang" approach.

The Crawl stage starts by implementing a set of transitional capabilities that will allow the organization to migrate in a more user-friendly, and organic fashion. We call this approach The Data | Process | Platform Method.

The Data | Process | Platform Method

The reason migrating systems can be so challenging is due to the day-to-day business processes that these systems support. Disrupting these processes is a non-starter so finding alternative approaches is a must. This problem is made even more difficult due to the complexity of the processes themselves. They are often a dark, tangled mess that crisscross people, process and technology.

The Data | Process | Platform Method is an approach designed to overcome this challenge. It seeks to offset the risk of disruption of 'change' by utilizing a single platform to choreograph the efforts of people, process and technology. It uses a data-intensive approach to create greater transparency and offers accelerated methods to implement new human-centric processes.

Key Components:

• A focus on rapid adoption made possible by self-service data access for non-technical users
• A means to externalize logic via embedded workflow to create greater transparency
• A central, governed graph data warehouse that offers extreme flexibility and supports human-centric data

This approach seeks to:

• Create digital twins of critical processes. The idea is to create greater transparency into critical business processes by making them easier to understand, easier to document, and easier change in support of future migration efforts.
• Make legacy data easier to access. One of the main reasons organizations wish to modernize core systems is to make the data they contain more accessible. Legacy data is often trapped within these systems and accessible only to subject matter experts with specific, licensed, access. This bottleneck is a significant detriment to data driven decisions. The Data and Process Method seeks to solve this problem by making data tied up within legacy systems more readily available.
• Implement workflows to replace legacy processes. By implementing simple workflows the organization can begin to externalize some of the logic kept within the application. Not only does this add value to the legacy application, it also makes it easier to document and therefore easier to shift to a more modern platform when the time comes. This approach is also great at replacing legacy spreadsheets which are often developed to work around inflexibility found in legacy systems.
• Enable executive-level planning dashboards. Executives and key stakeholders will want to see progress towards migration efforts. The Data and Process Method enables the definition and collection of key metrics that can be leveraged to provide this level of executive transparency.
• Create new opportunities for efficiency. When multiple legacy systems are required to support a given process, chances are there are disconnects. These disconnects equate to increased effort, more labor hours, and more cost. These processes can be extremely inefficient and therefore represent an opportunity. Organizations that have grown through acquisition will likely have this problem. For example, Finance teams will struggle to close the books every month with accounting data so fragmented. The Data | Process | Platform Method provides the perfect platform and approach to solve this problem. Thus creating new opportunities for efficiency.

This method can be used to augment and/or support legacy systems such as:

• ERP and Distribution Systems
• Finance/Accounting Systems
• Product Lifecycle Management Systems
• Material Specification Databases
• Legacy home-grown systems

Our Approach

Process Tempo is well-suited for augmenting and enabling legacy systems as a transitional step in the migration effort. The unique combination of Self-Service Visualization, Workflow and Embedded Graph data warehouse is easy to implement and can be used as a wrap around service extending and increasing the value of older systems.

The underlying graph repository is the perfect platform for storing complex data models. A table, or SQL-based platform, would require a high degree of upfront engineering cost and accessing this data will require very lengthy, complex queries. The graph offers a simpler alternative and has the added benefit of supporting advanced data science and pattern matching capabilities.

By empowering non-technical users to work directly with data in a self-service fashion it allows these users and those from the business community to have a say in the design and use of the platform. Process Tempo is meant to be a shared platform and not one solely owned and operated by IT. This is key when implementing new processes that can offset logic and rules trapped in legacy systems. Logic that the business (not IT) is often more familiar with.

To Learn More

The combined solution offers a unique set of capabilities which is well-suited to help organizations digitally transform and optimize internal resources. If your organization struggles to transform because of legacy systems and applications slowing it down, it may make sense to give us a call to discuss how we can help.

Use this link to get on our calendar to discuss!