Modernization Is for Feint of Heart

Let me tell you an anecdote. A while back I was discussing immortality with a friend. He’s about my age, close to the same age as COBOL, so lets say his vintage would now be legacy. He’s healthy, functions well, can still process information, do the chores and care for the household. I asked him if he could have a new set of organs transplanted today, specifically the heart, which could extend his useful life for another 20 years would he consider it. He quickly said no, why would I risk it now while I ‘m still healthy. That’s the legacy dilemma.

The heart of a corporation is essential to supporting it’s strategies and actions and therefore it’s outcomes. Why replace it while it still works. It’s slower, it’s less responsive, and with each day it heads towards certain failure. Yet today it works and the fear of replacing it is greater than the obvious. Unfortunately, just like my friend, who wouldn’t consider a transplant until his heart had stopped, many businesses wait until a merger, piece of legislation, system failure, loss of business or death of the corporation. There are plenty of these candidates, and the numbers are growing exponentially.

Legacy Modernization is for the feint hearted, that’s the dilemma. It is also the most practical solution to organizational immortality.

What about the healthy legacy sites, until a customer is against the ropes, they postpone modernizing their systems. They understand it, and in fact they spend a lot of money discussing it, but in the end they do nothing.

So what is the next best thing? In the case of a healthy legacy human, it would include proper diagnostics and expert advice on a heart smart program of diet and fitness and medication. Do nothing and you can hope that expensive and painful alternatives; bypass surgery, stents, angioplasty and pacemakers, or application wrapping, workarounds, jobal, and more hardware will keep you alive.

So at a minimum legacy environments should document and fully understand their current state from a business, application and data level and plan out a legacy migration intelligently. Smart modernization, for a smarter planet!

- Bill Bergen

Dying on the Vine

Dear Sir;

I represent a software company that specializes in crop management systems for vineyards. We have been selling and supporting our solution in our geography for the last 20 years and have succeeded in capturing over 70% of the market. Our support revenues have allowed us to fund growth in new geographies, enhance our applications functionality and provide a solid return to our investors. Lately however, our competitors have been calling on our install base, flogging their current state solution, pointing out to our clients the limitations or our aged technology stack. What should I do?

Signed – Dying on the Vine

Dear DOTV;

Seems like you have a couple choices. You can squeeze the remaining support revenue out of your once leading edge application. You can sell you customer base to one of your competitors. Or, if you want to continue to enjoy the success you have had in the past you can modernize your application. The third option is really not that difficult to do, and with the proper business case, not the difficult to fund. It is however the most common reason for businesses, like yours, to go out of business.

Signed – MAKE

This scenario is being played out every day in the global application solutions marketplace. What was once a bleeding edge competitive tool becomes an expensive yoke around a users neck. New entrants with application functionality built on today’s available technology stacks are counting on traditional ISV’s to do nothing. ISV’s that want to stay in business must renovate their existing application to take advantage of the extendibility and price point of new technology platforms.

-Bill Bergen

Failing and Flailing to Modernize

Let’s face it – it’s costly to maintain legacy systems and it’s costly to modernize one – more costly than we care to admit – and because of this, organization fail to modernize and flail on their way towards modernization.

Organizations struggle with this dilemma because as Ori and Rom Brafman note in their Bestseller “Sway”, “we play not to lose” and hence we create scenarios where a “$20 bill costs us $240.”

In this scenario, an auction for a $20 bill is created and the rules are:

• Bids are made in increments of $1
• The winner of the auction wins the $20
• The runner up must honor his or her bid and will receive nothing in return

Whether this auction is run with Harvard MBA students or seasoned executives the outcome is always the same – the bidding starts fast and furious, hits about $12 – $16, everyone except the two highest bidders drops out and the bidding continues to climb up and up well beyond the $20 mark.

In others words, the deeper the hole the more they continue to dig.

Playing not to lose, in the modernization dilemma, looks like staying on the same system and investing more, more and still more just to stay afloat. It can rear its ugly head through misguided attempts as failed Greenfield implementations followed by direct code conversions, where modernization it still not yet achieved.

In both cases, organizations cling to “playing not to lose” and the costs go up and up.

So how do we change this? Well we start by “playing to win” and playing to win means admitting that there is a problem and the first problem that we need to admit is that in modernization, all too often we “play not to lose”.

http://www.swaybook.com

- Wendy Van Donkelaar

Perpetual modernization

What does it mean to “modernize a system” in the hyper-changing environment that technology has thrown us into? It could mean adopting a culture that embraces change, a culture that leads, creates, and improves at a speed consistent with the needs of the people and processes it supports.

In the course of bringing your current systems forward to take advantage of today’s technologies, you must build an environment that supports perpetual change – to design structure and process that responds to today’s needs, and the probably different needs and situations of tomorrow. Once you start to modernize you must continue to modernize to avoid having to modernize.

We at MAKE understand this problem. We have seen just how overwhelming a decision to modernize can become. Working with our clients, who quickly become our partners, we have overcome this dilemma and successfully moved them to a current technical state that will stay current and provide a platform for continuous improvement built on their enterprise’s best practices.

- Bill Bergen