Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

Organizations are under continual pressure to deliver faster, with shorter time-to-market, while introducing new products and services at the same time.
You and your team have concerns that your existing portfolio of applications is not up to the task.
While you understand the need for more investments to modernize your portfolio, your leadership does not appreciate what is required.

Our Advice

Critical 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 the investments under control, and is prepared for surprises but always has your final state in mind.

Impact and Result

Evaluate the current state, develop a legacy application strategy, and execute in an agile manner.
When coupled with a business case and communications strategy, this approach gives the organization a clear decision-making framework that will maximize business outcomes and deliver value where needed.

Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Research & Tools

1. Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Storyboard – Understand legacy application modernization in the context of your organization, assess your landscape of applications, and define prioritization and disposition.

This blueprint provides the steps necessary to build your own enterprise application implementation playbook that can be deployed and leveraged by your implementation teams.

2. Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization Presentation Template – The key output from leveraging this research is a presentation to pitch the modernization process.

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.

Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

Revamp your business potential to improve agility, security, and user experience while reducing costs.

Analyst Perspective

An old application may have served us reliably, but it can prevent us from pursuing future business needs.

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

Ricardo de Oliveira
Research Director, Enterprise Applications
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge	Common Obstacles	Info-Tech's Approach
Organizations face continual pressure to decrease time-to-market while also introducing new products and services. You and your team have concerns that the existing application portfolio is not up to the task. While you may understand the need for greater investment to modernize your portfolio, leadership does not appreciate what is required.	For well-established organizations, applications can have a long lifespan. Employees who are used to existing tools and processes often resist change. Modernization plans can be substantial, but budget and resources are limited. Poor documentation of legacy applications can make it challenging to know what to modernize and how to do it effectively. There are concerns that any changes will have material impacts on business continuity.	Info-Tech will enable you to build a proposal deck to make the case for legacy application modernization for your stakeholders. This will assist with: Defining what a legacy application is in the context of your organization. Creating a list of candidate applications for modernization. Articulating the right disposition strategy for each selected applications. Laying out what is next on your modernization journey.

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.

An approach to making the case for legacy application modernization

Understand Assess the challenges, lay out the reasons, define your legacy, and prepare to remove the barriers to modernization.
Assess Determine the benefits by business capability. Leverage APM foundations to select the candidate applications and prioritize.
Define Use the prioritized application list to drive the next steps to modernization.

Legacy application modernization is perceived as necessary to remain competitive

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

State CIO Priorities

US government agencies feel pressured to deal with legacy applications

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:

10 critical federal IT legacy systems
In operation between 8 and 51 years
Collectively cost $337 million per year to operate and maintain

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021

Example: In banking, modern platforms are essential

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)

Case Study

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: Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

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:

Understand your challenges with modernization
Define legacy applications in your context
Assess your barriers to modernization
Find the impacted capabilities and their benefits
Define candidate applications and dispositions

This phase involves the following participants:

Application group leaders
Individual application owners

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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