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14 Smart Strategies For Effectively And Efficiently Modernizing Legacy Tech

Forbes Technology Council

From security to productivity, there are compelling reasons for a company to modernize its legacy tech—even when it’s “still working.” Unfortunately, it’s not a simple question of buying a new slate of software. It’s essential to ensure that processes and productivity aren’t negatively impacted during the switch and that everyone on the team understands what’s at stake and is ready (and willing) to learn and adopt the new tools coming in.

To keep up with the competition—and to avoid a catastrophic shutdown if legacy tech suddenly breaks down or can’t be serviced any longer—businesses operating with high levels of technical debt must form a smart plan for modernization. Below, 14 members of Forbes Technology Council share smart strategies tech leaders can leverage as they guide their organizations in sunsetting legacy tech.

1. Quantify Your Technical Debt’s Impact On Business Objectives

To modernize legacy tech, first assess the level of technical debt and quantify its impact on your business objectives. Then, prioritize apps based on that impact, complexity and refactoring effort, and calculate the risk-adjusted projected ROI. Finally, the organizational structure must support the needs of the targeted architecture. - Moti Rafalin, vFunction Inc.

2. Take A ‘Crawl, Walk, Run’ Approach

Modernizing technology is best approached by dividing the transformation into phases of rapid implementations, beginning with the changes most quickly and easily deployed. This “crawl, walk, run” approach allows for tech improvements to be made incrementally and quickly, achieving success immediately while building toward more sophisticated improvements over a period of time. - Sarvarth Misra, ContractPodAi


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3. Look For A New Solution Whose Team Understands Your Current System

When the team feels it’s “still working,” it’s important to identify new technology solutions with founders and developers who have experience with the legacy system. Often, their modern solution offers better efficiency and other benefits driven by their experience. Understand the potential efficiencies, work together to develop metrics from those claims and put milestones in place to prove them. - Donna Conroy, SciMar ONE, INC

4. Ask Where You Want To Be In Five Years

I would place modernizing legacy tech that is still working in the “not urgent, but important” quadrant of a priorities matrix. It’s not going to show up in a quarterly planning cycle until things are on the verge of a meltdown. To make the right decisions, leaders should ask, “Where do I want our systems to be in five years?” and work backward to get to where they need to be. - Ian Tien, Mattermost

5. Think In Terms Of People, Technology And Process

There are three pillars to guide digital transformation strategy. People: Focus on everyone impacted by the digital transformation, from customers and employees to leadership. Technology: Consider the time to value, reduce complexity and engage customers at their point of contact. Process: Ensure the new tech simplifies and improves your business processes by connecting large sets of data points. - Khadim Batti, Whatfix

6. Engage End Users Throughout The Process

Engaging end users early and throughout a digital transformation project can not only keep a project from failing but also ensure high levels of adoption and success. By leveraging a broad cross section of user personas, technology transformation teams can ensure that the designs resonate with users and that reengineering work has a positive impact on the business. - Robin Fleming, Anvl

7. Base Decisions On Risk

Take a risk-based approach. Whether you focus on financial or reputation risk (or in the healthcare industry, patient safety and clinical efficacy), rooting your strategy with risk-based decision making will yield organizationwide buy-in as well as systemic intentionality around technology adoption. - Mike Kijewski, MedCrypt

8. Always Ensure Quick Scaling

Think big, start small and scale quickly. The best way you can achieve this type of productivity is to ensure that the “start small” aspect enables you to scale quickly. For example, if you know you have business processes that are a good fit for serverless architectures, then ensure your “start small” step includes training or hiring the right talent to help your team scale quickly. - James Beecham, ALTR

9. Block Out Times For Clearing Technical Debt

There are two ways to stay on top of tech: big upgrade projects or incremental modernization. At times you have to do the former, but I’m also a believer in the latter. Companies should block out regular intervals during which developers clean up technical debt. Fixing hurried patches with planned solutions helps stabilize systems and make them more maintainable. - Venky Balasubramanian, Plivo

10. Monitor The User Base Of Every Piece Of Technology In Your Organization

Keep a tab on the current user base of every incumbent technology and see if it continues to enjoy a retainer base of at least two-thirds of its peak. If it falls below that level, explore to see why once-loyal adopters are migrating out, and see if you too should proactively shift. As a rule, ensure you’re clear on what’s next in line or the “heir apparent” of every important piece of technology you use, regardless of when you switch! - Pramod Konandur Prabhakar, Pelatro PLC

11. Ensure You Can Efficiently Migrate Data

Every business should leverage a strategy for effectively and efficiently modernizing legacy technology that is not only cost-effective but is also designed to ensure data integrity.This means that the strategy must be able to provide an efficient and affordable method of migrating data from existing systems into a new technology infrastructure. - Leon Gordon, Pomerol Partners

12. Discover What The Super Users Of Your Legacy System Like And Dislike

Find the true leaders and super users of your legacy systems. Teams look to their unofficial leaders to gauge how they should feel about change. Discover those users’ likes and dislikes when it comes to the legacy system. Show them how the new system can match or expand on the things they like and how it can overcome and fix the things they dislike. Getting buy-in from these individuals will make or break your digital transformation. - Alex Waddell, Adobe Care and Wellness

13. Tie Modernization To Business Outcomes

Executives looking for buy-in and funding for legacy modernization have to tie modernization to business outcomes. Doing business in the modern world requires (many times, contractually) 24/7 availability, the ability to provide information to ecosystem partners, automated operations (self-service) and so on. There are also functional or feature upgrades that have to be tied to the modernization. - Habeeb Mahaboob, TechMahindra (BE)

14. Build The New In Parallel With The Old

You likely want to remove any possibility of downtime or system failure during a transition to new technology. So, when modernizing your systems, build a new version in parallel with the old. This strategy is called parallel running. In the short term, it ensures your business operates smoothly. In the long term, the IT team can test and transition your operations to the new system gradually. - Nicholas Domnisch, EES Health

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