Michael Coté and Marc Zottner co-wrote this article.
Legacy software can slow—or even stop—business growth. As organizations hit a legacy wall, they face an unfortunate reality: When IT systems are too old and unchangeable, it’s impossible to transform the way their core business works. In fact, 76 percent of executives say that legacy software is holding them back, according to a Forrester report commissioned by VMware. What does that mean for today’s businesses? For some, it means old systems that are hard to extend, patch, and keep updated, which heightens security risks and increases organizational vulnerability. For others, it indicates a compromised ability to ensure good data governance or a degradation in performance and efficiency.
For enterprises looking to escape the legacy trap, the inability to successfully modernize applications has very real and strategic business implications. It can become the difference between innovating for the future or falling behind the competition, between leveraging the best human capital or diverting and diluting resources. When you’re caught in a legacy trap, you can’t add new features to your software fast enough, which means you can’t change how your business operates or innovate at a sustainable speed.
So, how does this trap get set? It’s a consequence of the technical debt accumulated by the existing infrastructure and software within organizations. There’s just no way to change existing systems as quickly as today’s business pace demands for various reasons:
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Fitness – Software can no longer evolve and scale reliably to meet user demand. It might run too slowly as measured in actual response time or in workflow processing time, or you might not be able to apply security fixes or upgrades.
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Capability – Software cannot easily leverage new capabilities, such as programming languages, modern architecture patterns, API access (as with open banking), or user interface types (like mobile), and it can’t run on new types of infrastructure.
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Forgotten – Even though software might be capable, people have forgotten how it works or there are few people with the skills to operate and change the software or who have knowledge of the original designs.
Linking business value to modernization: A holistic way out of the trap
The ability to link business value to your modernization efforts is critical to success for several reasons. It not only ensures a strategic foundation to guide application transformation, but it also provides a holistic approach that links culture, methodology, tools, and platform. To escape the legacy trap, you need to make it simple and quick to show business value, working iteratively instead of modernizing all applications at once. Here are five keys to escaping the legacy trap.
1. Focus on the why and business outcomes – Beyond saving money, there is really only one reason to modernize your software: to give your business a competitive edge by delivering on new business ideas for your end users. Losing focus in the process, for example by getting distracted with technology, is a common pitfall. That’s why you need to begin with why you need to modernize. You don’t need new apps. You need the flexibility and speed to change and innovate. The apps are what will give you the capabilities to do that. Once you understand the why behind modernization, you can identify apps to modernize that are closely connected to the business. And, because highly visible projects can be high risk and highly stressful to organizations, focusing on small, meaningful apps to modernize instead of big ones is key to long-term success.
2. Perform outcome-led portfolio rationalization – Once you’ve determined your business needs, it’s time to modernize your portfolio. Your modernization strategy should answer the three following questions:
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Disposition – To what degree should I transform my apps? For example, completely rewriting or just moving them from on-premises to the public cloud?
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Stacks – What are my target technology stacks and landing zones?
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Prioritization – Which apps and teams should I transform first?
Aiming for the highest impact with the least effort at the beginning is a great idea. This requires deeply linking transformational work to your desired business outcomes and objectives to help ensure that you transform the right apps. At the same time, you also need to quantify the business value of modernization (e.g., speed, savings, security, stability, scalability).
3. Find the applications – Just finding all applications deployed within an enterprise is often a very daunting task. Instead of relying on manually updating spreadsheets to identify and list all existing application and infrastructure assets in a central inventory, leverage tools to automate the discovery process. As you look across your application portfolio, you’ll undoubtedly find many applications that don’t seem to connect to the business or provide real value. Referring to the areas identified in the previous bullet point (speed, savings, security, stability, scalability) will aid you in strongly linking applications to business outcomes and help find the real value.
4. Group applications – Once you’ve found the applications, categorize them based on application type and each app’s technical characteristics, then group applications based on their business and technical similarities. Through well-defined groups, you can greatly reduce the number of application archetypes, which will allow you to analyze and work with those applications in aggregate instead of one by one.
5. Modernize how you work – To unleash the true potential of your application modernization strategy, you should focus on modernizing the structure, process, and culture of the organization. Older software keeps you in the legacy trap, as does an outmoded organizational culture. That’s why a generative culture is focused on learning, ongoing improvement, and moving most decision-making as close to developers as possible. The environment you want is one of self-organizing and learning from each other through cross-disciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery. Changing culture isn’t easy, but it’s vital to long-term success.
Yes, the legacy trap is real. But an application modernization strategy that aligns with your business strategy is how you escape the trap. When the processes and practices to build modern software are put into place, supported by tools that help developer productivity and can run any app, on any cloud, on a unified platform, organizations that build a culture founded upon continuous improvement and delivering customer success break free of the legacy trap.
See how you can help your organization escape the legacy trap by reading more in this eBook or watching the free replay of a webinar we presented.
For years, VMware Tanzu Labs has helped hundreds of organizations across industries escape their own legacy traps and modernize their software development practices. In addition, the VMware Tanzu suite of products is designed to support organizations’ efforts to build, deliver, and operate modern, cloud native apps and to avoid getting stuck in the legacy trap as they move forward.
