Advancing from legacy

By Tony Virdi of Atos Origin

Businesses are re-establishing growth agendas and becoming ever more dependent on IT solutions to remain competitive. In all companies, large and small, legacy IT systems are increasingly becoming a business issue. Failure to address the situation will ultimately impact growth as well as company performance. Yet most organisations have failed to address their legacy issues in any significant manner since Y2K programmes in the late 1990s. Atos Origin commissioned the National Computing Centre (NCC) to perform a UK survey asking ‘How advanced are you with your legacy applications?’ The aim of the survey was to investigate organisational strategies and perceptions in relation to their legacy applications. The results of the survey demonstrate that legacy systems are inhibiting business improvement and potentially damaging the boardroom perception of IT.

What is Legacy?

Atos Origin defines legacy to include those applications that are potentially unsupportable or have a relatively high cost of ownership. It also includes inflexible technology that cannot adapt to changing environments and applications that suffer from skills shortages. Organisations need to consider their data, applications, infrastructure and business processes to fully understand their ‘as-is’ IT environment. The NCC survey found that, in organisations with 50 or more IT staff, 25 to 50 percent of the application portfolio is legacy. Almost 10 percent of respondents expect that anything between 50 and 75 percent of their budget will be spent on legacy. Crucially over a quarter of respondents indicated that more than half of their critical systems are legacy.

How can Legacy grow?

Legacy IT estates can result from one or many contributing factors. These include merger activity, organic growth, product diversification or business agendas that have neglected IT cost reduction programmes. To some extent even new IT programmes sometimes create legacy issues as they are potentially unusable without significant modification. Dealing with these issues is done by degrees. The survey showed a positive trend with 30 percent declaring they are implementing a defined roadmap. Worryingly, 13 percent were still ‘fire-fighting’ as they lack the control or bandwidth required to release the added value of a modern IT environment.

What are the issues with Legacy?

In an increasingly competitive market organisations have to continue to evolve at the same rate or faster than its competitors to maintain and increase market share. This continuous evolution causes increased complexity as the supporting IT estate grows and new or improved functionality is integrated into it. Furthermore as the IT estate is forced to operate under the constraints of more demanding regulatory compliance this results in even more complexity and sometimes increased operational risk.

Organisations are hence struggling to manage the day-to-day requirements of the complex IT estates they have created. The majority of investment goes into short-term initiatives rather than longer-term complexity reduction programmes. These estates then lack agility and are unable to move as fast as the organisation they support. 58 percent of NCC respondents consider the lack of agility to be the main challenge of legacy. 42 percent believed complexity of integration was a challenge they were facing with their IT estates.

How can you address Legacy the Right Way?

A comprehensive assessment of the ‘as-is’ environment plays a crucial role. Prioritising and identifying the potential business value to be derived from an IT transformation programme provides an organisation with benchmark metrics by which ROI can be measured.

IT decision makers must be clear on the benefits and goals of transformation programmes, understanding not only the required investment in terms of time and resources but also the impact of planned changes. This understanding allows the development of a transformation roadmap which prioritises work based upon the critical path as well as targeting ‘quick-wins’ to optimise investment.

Every legacy transformation journey differs from the next and it is vital to understand the pitfalls. Too often organisations focus on the destination without concentrating on a step-by-step progression. Atos Origin has developed a global methodology around legacy transformation splitting the journey into four key stages covering data, applications, business processes and infrastructure: Assess, Plan, Transform and Sustain. We support organisations through their journey to a more agile, lower risk IT environment with reduced TCO. We believe all organisations have different requirements as they each have different legacy issues. Our approach is holistic yet specific to each organisation, ensuring that we can deliver sustainable benefits.

What Next?

Legacy will continue to challenge organisations and will remain intrinsic in the corporate IT environment supporting business critical applications that are too high risk to replace. Organisations cannot allow the key components of their IT estate to become legacy, thereby losing competitive advantage and eventually market share. Many organisations are now defining roadmaps for their IT estate and investing in transforming these estates into systems that are lower cost, lower risk and more agile. Atos Origin are well placed to help them on this challenging journey.