While it is critical for CIOs to keep up with the latest technologies to advance in their digital transformation journey, they shouldn’t immediately opt for abandoning their legacy systems.
The rapid modernization of the infrastructure has accelerated the adoption and integration of latest technologies. Pushing for accelerating the digital transformation journey has also played a critical role in the implementation of advanced technologies. However, most organizations still possess old applications and infrastructure in their IT stacks. There are a few good reasons for that.
Legacy IT provides a stable, inherently efficient and paid for infrastructure. Additionally, a few organizations are still not able to leave their legacy systems behind because they are well-run, homogenized, customizable and are fully in a depreciated state. Moreover, some CIOs believe that replacing their legacy systems won’t yield them high enough returns to consider prioritizing modernization. Thus, they are still favoring retaining their legacy applications and infrastructure.
Since completely replacing legacy IT infrastructure isn’t a viable option, it is crucial that they streamline those legacy technologies to make them work at their peak performance. This will enable them to deliver reasonable benefits at the lowest costs along with the lowest risk possible. Here are five ways that CIOs can streamline their legacy IT infrastructure
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Most of the business processes supported by legacy IT systems contain segments that are made up of highly structured and repetitive tasks. This increases the workload of the IT teams that are supporting them. Thus, CIOs should take initiatives to automate pieces within a legacy environment. This will enable them to bring efficiencies to reduce manual efforts, limit or eliminate errors, improve quality, and amplify data consistency, while increasing productivity.
At the same time, it is important that they assess the different processes targeted for automation and streamline them before automating. If not, automating bad processes won’t deliver the necessary benefits. While it can increase the speed of legacy systems and processes and the various processes they support, automation is not a complete replacement for a full-scale modernization.
Simply moving legacy systems to the cloud infrastructure doesn’t pay off. While it can be an option, there are times when it’s appropriate, it has been shown that taking this measure is typically more expensive. Instead, CIOs should take some of the principles of managing the cloud and apply them to manage their legacy systems. On the surface, it appears that CIOs may be wasting a considerable amount of storage. However, it will save a lot of time for the employees after taking some of the processing out of the equation.
Similar to the principles of cloud, CIOs should borrow modern management techniques and adopt a product-centric approach to their legacy infrastructure. This will enable the organization as well as IT to keep their focus on business outcomes. With that focus, IT can zero in on how they can structure and optimize legacy technologies for those outcomes. Also, a product-oriented approach provides IT teams supporting the legacy infrastructure better visibility into the problems that are impacting their overall business outcomes.
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Most of today’s employees desire to work on the latest tools and technologies. While showing willingness to learn new technologies is always a good thing to have, it is equally important for CIOs to have team members who have the skills to support older technologies. Instead of portraying that working on legacy tools can be detrimental in the long run for their career development, they should encourage their staff to maintain skills in the legacy technologies as well.
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Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
