Legacy Issues:

A Mechanical Orchard research report

What IT leaders really think about legacy modernization

Recreate and Deliver

Based on our learnings, we build a perfect replica of this component in a secure cloud environment where it’s subject to rigorous performance and functional criteria before it goes live. Now this component is modern, tested, instrumented and well understood. Most importantly, it’s ready for innovation—while running smoothly with the rest of the legacy system.

Repeat and Innovate

The process iterates with the next component until the entire system has deployed into the cloud environment. Each subsequent component could take progressively less time through applying our AI tools and organizational learnings.

Because we only work with a single component at a time, each one has a proven fallback method. This profoundly limits the risk to your living, breathing system at any given time.

september 19, 2024

It’s widely acknowledged that modernization is stressful. Senior IT leaders are delaying IT modernization due to fear of failure and worry that it may harm their career. This risk-averse attitude contrasts with a “just do it” approach among their teams (not C-suite) who believe that creaking legacy systems are holding companies back and making it hard to reap the full rewards of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Internal politics and lack of a cohesive vision are causing delays or failure.

Introduction

“The can has been kicked down the road for years now. We’ve simply run out of road”

- Edward Hieatt, Chief Customer Officer, Mechanical Orchard

Recreate and Deliver

Repeat and Innovate

The modernization mentality

Most important attributes

64%

Leadership

61%

Technical expertise

61%

Adaptability

57%

Long-term focus/vision

45%

Ability influence

Our research highlighted that Enterprise IT leaders tend to favor traditional leadership traits, while entrepreneurial attributes are assigned the least value to success in their roles. For example, technical expertise was rated very highly (61%), while curiosity scored low at 19%.

Research Findings

The top drivers for planned business critical application migrations to the cloud are:

55%

Improved scalability and flexibility

42%

Improved computing capabilities and workload performance

40%

Increased business continuity and resilience

39%

Cloud capabilities continue to better support customer and/or user experiences

34%

Maximizing applications' business outcomes by leveraging cloud technology benefit

Conclusion

The practicalities of modernizing old systems isn’t primarily what’s preventing decision-makers from moving ahead. It’s far more nuanced, complex and personal than that. Failure is a fungible term. It can mean not delivering to a timeframe and a particular budget. It can also mean not achieving the desired outcomes.

That’s why this is a psychological issue more than a technological one. No one wants to admit to failure. Instead, they continually chip away at the definition of success to merely mean being in the cloud. (Even if the cloud-based system is stuffed with incomprehensible code, translated from the legacy system, that’s difficult to change.)

As one IT executive shared, most organizations have long developed a set of “coping mechanisms” for their legacy systems. Such mechanisms have become so comfortable that organizations rarely examine them to see if they are healthy and good for their business and their IT.

“Most folks, if they were more honest about the coping mechanisms they’ve developed, would recognize that they’re carrying around legacy IT systems that are much riskier than the way they’re currently treating it.”

About Mechanical Orchard

At Mechanical Orchard, we specialize in safely rewriting the most critical and complex business applications so they’re ready to adapt quickly and easily to market challenges and opportunities. Our approach emerged from observing the decades-long patterns in modernization efforts.