Why it is high time to get rid of your legacy applications?

Recently while speaking to one of our prospective Global customer – when they requested us to take over their WCMS (Web Content Management System) which is hosting multiple websites (both intranet and client facing sites), Legacy CRM and several smaller custom applications for us maintain it, we found that not only they were unhappy with the current supporting vendor but the business team was very frustrated with the challenges they face with these applications.

While working on transitioning these applications to take over, we encountered several problems.

• No documentation – hardly any good write up on systems, integration, data model etc. we have to use reverse engineering to understand the code base.
• Poor User Adoption – Customer told us that they are not expecting any enhancement on these systems and it clearly means very low user adoption. Software systems will have more enhancement requires when systems are being used extensively.
• No Clear Future Roadmap – there was hardly any roadmap to enhance Users or Customer experience and the common comment from business is - we have put hold on all our new requirements.
• Lack of Inhouse Skills – The system knowledge with the customer was very thin and huge dependency on the existing vendor.
• Enhancement Requests - Its very hard to make any enhancements as the systems were developed without using any best practices and it would have been nightmare to introduce any new features as per customer

It is very strange to see when the whole world is moving towards technology adoption from ordering cab to buying food on finger tips – some of the large corporations are still stuck with legacy applications. It is not only hampering their own growth, it is also limiting their own employees performance in their day to day jobs.

Hence its very important for organizations to get rid of their Legacy Application for the following key Reasons:

Empowering your Employees – whether they are in customer facing, support staff or IT team, getting rid of your legacy applications will drive better employee agility and efficiency. New tech stack will let them experiment with new ideas in an iterative fashion.

Superior Customer Experience – If the applications are customer facing, organizations will get hugely benefited by modernizing their apps. (For ex. After all who likes to remember the User IDs and Passwords of your sites when the whole world has moved towards using Social Logins?)

No more Device Dependency – It takes out device dependency and you can move your Legacy system to Mobile Friendly apps by modernizing it. The mobile first approach lets your employees or customers to access applications from anywhere whether on iPADs or Mobiles and it significantly add value to organization by enhancing efficiency.

Lower TCO - Legacy applications, outdated software applications, outages, database costs, training and maintenance costs add to huge TCO in maintaining these applications. One can also add some of the intangible ones like Employee Retention, Customer satisfaction etc. Modernizing the legacy applications will help to lower the TCO.

Power of Cloud - Leverage the power of cloud in modernizing your apps from scalability, performance to have the most secured applications. Enterprise can take the advantage of cloud to accelerate innovation, adding agility and scale with higher confidence.

At the same time its not easy to secure budget to modernize your IT stack to get rid of your legacy applications. Following are some of the key guidelines to see how one can build a strong Business case for IT modernization.

Start with clear Business Vison - Demonstrate what your Users are missing by not having the new applications and how it is impacting your overall business. (Eg, Employees to make phone calls to internal IT help desk and spend long hours while using inefficient systems)

Business KPIs - How this program can drive certain KPIs and demonstrate by baselining the existing metrics and show what you can achieve by modernizing the tech stack. (For ex. time to refresh website can reduce to just one hour from a week)

Return on Investment (ROI) - by demonstrating what one can achieve with clear articulated ROI can shift the discussion and expedite decision faster while securing budgets. (For example - replace the inefficient legacy CRM vendor with Saas based application)

Blue Print and Program Plan - have a very clearly chartered plan with Product Backlog, Use Cases, timelines, key dependencies and what impact this program will make on the users can go very handy while convincing to secure budgets. It demonstrates that the team is ahead of the game and thought through all hurdles to execute this engagement.

Future proof your Business - You are not revamping just for the current business sake, demonstrate how you are planning to stay ahead of competition and what foundation you are building to enhance User experience. (For Ex. you can build a ChatBot to drive customer service much easier with new stack than current legacy application and you can move to Whatsapp based customer services as next big thing)

Its high time to get rid of your legacy IT applications and embrace the new change !