Three-quarters of organizations fail to complete legacy system modernizations

New research from Advanced shows that 74 percent of organizations have started a legacy system modernization project but failed to complete it.

The report also suggests a disconnect between business and technical teams could be to blame. CIOs and heads of IT are more interested in the technology landscape of their organisation as a whole, whereas enterprise architects are more internally focused.

More than two-thirds (69 percent) of enterprise architects cite hardware dependency and other technical influences as the primary reason to modernize whereas CIOs and heads of IT cite business competitiveness (66 percent), security (58 percent) and integration (54 percent).

Only 12 percent of application and infrastructure managers report receiving full funding commitment from leadership teams for their modernization projects and 56 percent say this failure to get funding is driven by fear of change.

By contrast more than half (53 percent) of CIOs and 42 percent of CFOs get full funding commitments from senior leadership. It suggests that, in order to move forward with these initiatives, technical team members need to substantiate the business case better for these efforts using terms that the broader business team can understand.

"Collaboration is absolutely essential to successful modernization," says Brandon Edenfield, managing director of application modernization at Advanced. "To achieve this, technical teams must ensure that senior leadership see the value and broader business impact of these efforts in terms they can understand. Without full commitment and buy-in from the C-Suite, these projects run the risk of complete failure."

Most respondents do agree on the value of the Cloud in modernization. 98 percent of those surveyed report active plans to move legacy applications to the Cloud in 2020.

Edenfield adds, "As our world grows increasingly connected, organizations need to get more serious about modernization. If organizations are to adapt to market changes and remain competitive, organizations need to consider legacy modernization as the foundation and starting point of their overall digital transformation efforts. Those who fail to prioritize this shift risk falling behind their competition and significant revenue loss in the future."

The full report is available from the Advanced site.

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