Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
This blueprint provides the steps necessary to build your own enterprise application implementation playbook that can be deployed and leveraged by your implementation teams.
Build a proposal deck to make the case for legacy application modernization for your stakeholders. This will contain a definition of what a legacy application is in the context of your organization, a list of candidate applications to modernize, and a disposition strategy for each selected application.
Legacy systems remain well-embedded in the fabric of many organizations' application portfolios. They were often custom-built to meet the needs of the business. Typically, these are core tools that the business leverages to accomplish its goals.
A legacy application becomes something we need to address when it no longer supports our business goals, is no longer supportable, bears an unsustainable ownership cost, or poses a threat to the organization's cybersecurity or compliance.
When approaching your legacy application strategy, you must navigate a complex web of business, stakeholder, software, hardware, resourcing, and financial decisions. To complicate matters, the full scope of required effort is not immediately clear. Years of development are embedded in these legacy applications, which must be uncovered and dealt with appropriately.
IT leaders require a proactive approach for evaluating the current state, developing a legacy application strategy, and executing in an agile manner. When coupled with a business case and communications strategy, the organization will have a clear decision-making framework that will maximize business outcomes and deliver value where needed.
Ricardo de Oliveira
Research Director, Enterprise Applications
Info-Tech Research Group
Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech's Approach |
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Info-Tech Insight
Legacy modernization is a process, not a single event. Your modernization approach requires you to understand your landscape and decide on a path that minimizes business continuity risks, keeps investments under control, and is prepared for surprises but always has your final state in mind.
Understand Assess the challenges, lay out the reasons, define your legacy, and prepare to remove the barriers to modernization. |
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Assess Determine the benefits by business capability. Leverage APM foundations to select the candidate applications and prioritize. |
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Define Use the prioritized application list to drive the next steps to modernization. |
The 2022 State CIO Survey by NASCIO shows that legacy application modernization jumped from fifth to second in state CIO priorities.
"Be patient and also impatient. Patient because all states have a lot of legacy tech they are inheriting and government is NOT easy. But also, impatient because there is a lot to do - make your priorities clear but also find out what the CIO needs to accomplish those priorities."
Source: NASCIO, 2022
In fiscal year 2021, the US government planned to spend over $100 billion on information technology. Most of that was to be used to operate and maintain existing systems, including legacy applications, which can be both more expensive to maintain and more vulnerable to hackers. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified:
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021
Increasing competition from fintech | 73% of financial services executives perceive retail banking as being the most susceptible to fintech disruption (PwC, 2016) |
Growing number of neo-banks | The International Monetary Fund (IMF) notes the fast growth of fintech in financial services is creating systemic risk to global financial stability (IMF, 2022) |
Access to data and advanced analytics | Estimated global bank revenue lost due to poor data is 15% to 25% (MIT, 2017) |
Shifting client expectations/demographics | 50% of Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z use a digital bank to provide their primary checking account (Finextra, 2022) |
Generational transfer of wealth | It is estimated that up to US$68 trillion in wealth will be transferred from baby boomers (Forbes, 2021) |
Delta takes off with a modernized blend of mainframes and cloud
INDUSTRY: Transportation
SOURCE: CIO Magazine, 2023
Challenge The airline has hundreds of applications in the process of moving to the cloud, but most main capabilities are underpinned by workloads on the mainframe and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Some of those workloads include travel reservation systems and crew scheduling systems - mission-critical, 24/7 applications that are never turned off. |
Solution Delta has shifted to a hybrid architecture, with a customer experience transformation that makes the most of the cloud's agility and the mainframe's dependability. Delta's foray into the cloud began about two years ago as the pandemic brought travel to a virtual halt. The airline started migrating many front-end and distributed applications to the cloud while retaining traditional back-end workloads on the mainframe. |
Results Hybrid infrastructures are expected to remain in complex industries such as airlines and banking, where high availability and maximum reliability are non-negotiable. While some CIOs are sharpening their mainframe exit strategies by opting for a steep journey to the cloud, mainframes remain ideal for certain workloads. |
Phase 1
1.1 Understand your challenges
1.2 Define legacy applications
1.3 Assess your barriers
1.4 Find the impacted capabilities
1.5 Define candidate applications
1.6 Now, Next, Later
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
This phase involves the following participants: