Five options for Legacy Systems Modernization

Five options for #legacySystem #modernization. If you are thinking about helping your company modernize, consider these five options below. 👇

Perhaps make a matrix or scorecard for each, and circulate that among your stakeholders. Let’s think through the options together:

Option 1: #CodeFreeze, Stop All Changes 🥶

Perhaps you can get more years out of it and save some costs by freezing all changes, trying to ride it into the sunset. Nobody touch it, nobody break it.

Perhaps that goes well, perhaps not. That depends upon how much your organizational ecosystem changes. You may be fine for a while, but then a new customer demand, or a mandatory operating system update forces the issue.

A business owner in the coffee commodities trading space once said to me, “manage risk and all else will take care of itself.”

Option 2: #KeepInvesting into #IncrementalUpdates and Fixes 🛠️

You can keep on tweaking it as you go, incrementally investing into the solution files. Yes, you see the expense accruing and starting to mount in comparison to the value created. But perhaps that is just the expense of doing business?

Option 3: #Migrate to a #DifferentPlatform 🚉

Always worth looking. If there is a vertical market tool for your industry, perhaps now is the time to go for that ERP.

You may even want to take a demo or two to consider where feature gaps exist, and how you would solve for them. It may have it all!

You see that even if all goes well, it may be a multi-year change process, retraining the entire team, and adjusting downstream such as your accounting, supplier or customer interactions.

And you are counting the cost of the risk of an ERP implementation failure. What if we hit late-stage showstoppers and need to remount or balk entirely?

Option 4: #Rewrite from Scratch ✍️

You’d love to lock your team in the conference room for 2 months and just build the system of your dreams. Once and for all, you could map out the processes, rethink modules that have been lacking, start fresh.

Yet you are also counting the 1,000’s of hours that went into it in the first place, and wondering if that number goes down this time? Hire in-house talent, bring in top-tier consultants, leverage offshore — no matter how you slice it, this will add up to a big number.

And then the timeline ... how can we wait for the rewrite? You’ve seen how these things get pushed out.

Option 5: Another Way? #ReverseCompatible Rolling Modernization?! 🛼

Might another way exist? Is there some process or checklist that we could follow to help reduce our effort, and roll out modernized solutions over time?

Could the new releases even be “reverse compatible” so that we can keep using the old while we adopt the new?

Good news! There is a way, a well-established path that others have blazed before. We’ve seen them do it, and we can show you how.

More to come!