Given the complex and closed nature of legacy IT systems, it is difficult to integrate them with other business systems to provide workflow automation and seamless processing capabilities.
So says Jennitha Chinniah, CEO of In4Group, who notes with the right legacy transformation strategies in place, optimisation can be achieved in an organisation's legacy environment.
In4Group, in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting an online Legacy Transformation Survey to gain insight and perspective into the legacy transformation strategies within South African organisations.
"The main objective of the Legacy Transformation Survey is to understand the limitations and inefficiencies that organisations in South Africa are facing that could be directly attributed to the legacy systems," Chinniah says.
She points out that a legacy transformation strategy helps organisations to unlock the true potential of their investments into legacy systems by assisting them to transport the legacy functionality on to modern Web and mobile platforms, while ensuring organisations gain real-time insight into transactional data.
"Organisations that do not transform legacy environments end up being more reactive and losing market share to their competition."
Chinniah advises management buy-in is a key factor that contributes to the success or failure of an organisation's legacy projects.
"Other factors that contribute to the failure of legacy transformation projects include lack of system knowledge, lack of skills, lack of business understanding, as well as organisational red tape," she adds.
Legacy transformation is a well-accepted phenomenon in developed countries, Chinniah points out, adding this is due to the fact that it brings quick results and safeguards years of intellectual property invested in legacy systems.
"It also provides a risk-free way for organisations to become more technology-savvy and client-centric. It addresses all needs of the current information age by unlocking the true value of transactional data and helps organisations make proactive decisions. All these apply completely in the South African context as well."
According to Chinniah, South African organisations have, unfortunately, taken a risky and expensive route of re-writing legacy functionality in modern programming languages.
"This approach is long drawn and comes at very high costs. Latest offerings around legacy transformation are set out to change this trend by offering simple and cost-effective alternatives that organisations can use to gain better time to market," Chinniah advises.
Given that many organisations are looking to, or have already invested in, expensive big data strategies, Chinniah believes it is important to note that more than 50% of an organisation's transactional data is locked in one or more legacy application.
"Hence most of these organisations are spending large sums of money to run analytics on data that is not current. Legacy transformation offers organisations the opportunity to gain real-time access to such data, and to move towards a real-time big data strategy," Chinniah concludes.
Click here to complete the Legacy Transformation Survey and stand a chance to win a Proline PC Stick 2GB, 32GB WiFi.
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