Two parallel strategies have generally been employed to manage these threats.

The first of these is gradual consolidation to a desired ecosystem of contemporary applications over several years. The business case being that one core system/ecosystem is cheaper to run than five.

Experience shows us, however, that the required transformation often costs substantially more than forecast. This is due to multiple costly/immature applications (rather than one fit-for-purpose application) being desired to make-up the target ecosystem.

Also, complex migrations, a rapidly moving market along with a regulatory environment driving change mid-transformation (and/or acquisitions adding to already compressed timelines), can also affect costs. The business case sensitivities change and generally the ‘case for consolidation’ no longer delivers to the required time and return-on-investment

The second strategy is to use digital technologies and integration services to ‘shield’ users from the underlying limitations of the legacy technology landscape. Multiple iterations of this approach have been utilised by organisations as technology has matured over the last 15 years, and the result is the ongoing duplication of functionality outside of core systems to meet customer’s expectations.

Such strategies have enabled organisations to keep-up with customers’ digital expectations and maintain compliance, until now. Factors including COVID-19 and associated new ways of working, increasing cyber risks and an ongoing focus on IT operating costs, have collided, shining the light on historic mitigations that are no longer fit-for purpose. These factors have accelerated the risk profile of the technical debt and legacy applications have become burning platforms. Without a contemporary consolidation business case, organisations find themselves outside of their security, compliance and continuity risk tolerances, unable to launch new offerings in a timely fashion and with unacceptable technology costs.

The shift to a revised strategy has been rapid - but as any technology professional will tell you, finding adequate capability and capacity to deliver is extremely difficult.

Allowing fewer strategic applications to die-on-the-vine while the more strategic systems/products continue the consolidation journey has been a natural progression. Application modernisation and ‘move-to-cloud’ are being employed successfully for these applications, however the 12–18-month timeframes required to successfully modernise and refactor for the benefits of cloud present significant risk for organisations already under fire. Getting the right team to start the journey is vital and increasingly difficult in today’s capacity constrained environment. External support is often required. 

The knock-on impact to ‘digital’ of modernisation and cloud-migration, coupled with the general inefficiencies of the underlying applications and services, means maintaining a meaningful compliance and product delivery pipeline is extremely difficult.

Many leading organisations are moving to low/no cloud applications to address these challenges and enable the rapid development of new propositions and business efficiency initiatives, while the ‘hood’ is open on the legacy organisation.

If you’d like to talk through proven solutions to your organisations technical debt click here to learn more. 

About the author

Chief Delivery Officer at global digital business, DB Results, Matt Nidd is a program delivery specialist with experience across multiple sectors, specialising in financial services, energy and utilities. He has key expertise and extensive experience in the delivery of large-scale enterprise projects while navigating complex compliance challenges. He has worked extensively with clients to help them assess, deploy and manage world-class technology solutions.