Tim Christensen, our Essential Services Specialist, talks legacy systems and the points in favour for keeping and enhancing them.

If you want easy access to all your organisation’s data, preferably in a way it can be surfaced to enable internal decision making or to allow your customers to self-service the way they’d like, it might not be practical or necessary to go through an exhaustive (and often exhausting) digital transformation process.

The organisations we work with increasingly seek cost-effective ways to make the best use of the systems and data they already have – including their legacy systems. We help them understand their current setups and look for ways to enhance them rather than replace them. 

Enhancements provide:

• maximised use of legacy systems and the ability to access their data via middleware systems and/or architectural changes

• cost-benefits and efficiencies rather than complete system replacement

• improved customer satisfaction and experiences.

What are legacy systems?

Legacy systems are old or outdated computer systems, applications or code that’s still being used within an organisation. They’re usually kept because they contain valuable data, or they were created for a special purpose and you can’t find a new system that does what they do.

Sometimes they’re bespoke systems that are no longer being supported or updated. 

Challenges associated with legacy systems

Organisations often end up with legacy systems that are important enough to keep but hard to use and maintain.

They can contain valuable data that’s often underutilised to inform decision-making, enable customer self service or improve user experience.

When an organisation depends on an old legacy system, they can feel apprehensive about the cost and potential disruption involved in replacing it. Sometimes there’s nothing suitable to replace them with, particularly if they were bespoke in the first place. And if staff who were familiar with maintaining a system are no longer available, there’s the added challenge of understanding it well enough to make decisions about its future.

Legacy systems can present all kinds of challenges:

• Maintenance – they often comprise a complex web of add-ons or fixes and don’t have adequate documentation. 

• Compatibility – how are you getting data into and out of your legacy systems, and what are the limitations on how these data are used?

• Operations – are they backed up? How are they monitored in case they fail?

• Security – how is access managed and what is in place to secure them from unauthorised use? Do they depend on third party software with security issues?

• Integration with newer technologies – if they’re not compatible with your cloud-based or other systems, how are you viewing and using the data contained within them? 

• Usability – are they easy to log in to and manage? Or do only a few people in your organisation know how to use them? Can you easily integrate their data into your regular reporting to see a full picture of your organisation? 

• Key person dependencies – they often rely on mature developers with a long knowledge of the organisation and the ability to use older programming languages. There’s also the risk involved in relying on your tech staff to remember the system exists, how it works and what it’s connected to.

How to evaluate your current legacy system setup

These are the questions we ask clients during a short, deep-dive research phase, to help them see the full picture:

• which legacy systems do you have?

• are your legacy systems still fit for purpose?

• what data sits in these legacy systems that you might like to actually use?

• how do these systems articulate with your other systems? 

• what are your key dependencies and risks?

• how are you monitoring and securing these systems?

• what are your options for keeping your systems?

• what are your options for retiring these systems?

You can use the answers to the question above as a ‘snapshot’ of your system setup and to identify and prioritise what you need to do next. 

It’s possible that your bespoke or specialised legacy system could remain in place for many more years, so long as they’re correctly backed up and securely protected.

But most systems have a use-by date, or a foreseeable set of circumstances that will require them to eventually be upgraded or transitioned to a different system. 

Doing this kind of deep-dive research puts you in a position of power to know what you have, how it works, whether it’s secure and, best of all, to see how it could be fully utilised in your organisation. After all, you likely set up that legacy system originally because it gave you something other systems couldn’t.

Weighing up your options: enhance or replace?

Clients are always looking at the trade-off when it comes to deciding between making the most of their legacy systems or moving into a full system replacement.

Sometimes our clients have been through a full system replacement and their legacy systems couldn’t be migrated, so they come to us looking for low-disruption, cost-efficient ways to move forward.

The Insight, Could digital integration be a better solution than digital transformation?, explains the differences between an integration and a digital transformation. It weighs up the decisions to either replace an organisation’s existing systems and databases with a streamlined single tool or use integration as an enhancement to gather data from wherever it is and present it where and how it’s needed.

Budgets are always a consideration. Some clients prioritise making progressive enhancements to existing systems with staged investments, in order to manage risks while delivering well-managed, immediate, incremental improvements. 

The decision to enhance rather than replace is extremely appealing to clients who want to avoid disruptions and downtime that would occur if staff needed to learn a new system.

Our co-design methodology includes the right team members at the right time, so their knowledge improves organisational efficiency. It’s not only a client’s teams and bottom line that benefit from integrating and enhancing systems – their customers also benefit from simpler, more intuitive ways to interact with an organisation.

What can enhancement look like?

These are some of the ways our clients have benefitted from integrating legacy systems with other data sources to enhance their operations.

A dashboard or intranet are examples of how integration can enable staff or customers to self-serve in a single location, rather than navigating to various sites or logging into different systems including legacy systems.

This Insight, What does your ideal dashboard or intranet look like?, describes ways of drawing together, transforming and serving up vitally important information from legacy systems and other sources – providing examples for different use cases such as local councils who want citizens to seamlessly self-serve and find information from a range of sources, managers who need to view key business indicators and issues in a single location, or company boards of directors who want critical summaries of strategic issues.

The case study, The essential steps in designing the perfect intranet dashboard, describes how the intranet dashboard we created for staff at the PTV Customer Call Centre transformed their roles so they could focus on their customers rather than on wrangling and logging into and out of multiple legacy systems, dozens of browser tabs and numerous external systems. 

Keen to understand your options for optimising legacy systems?

If you’re interested in making the best use of the valuable data within your legacy systems, there are many options available. We’re always happy to have a confidential conversation if you want to explore your alternatives.