The inhibiting effect of a legacy system on innovation: migrate without compromising business continuity

Almost every organization is working on renewing and improving one or more processes, along with the applications and systems that support them. But developments move fast. What you build today can become tomorrow’s legacy. At the same time, if you fail to modernize, outdated applications will inevitably limit your ability to innovate. So how do you actually move away from a legacy system? In this blog, we discuss two methods for transitioning to a new system or application without compromising business continuity.

Implementing an integration framework

Why start here? Because strong integration enables innovation by making migration easier. Suppose you want to innovate, but your existing systems are holding you back. How do you move from an old IT landscape to a new one, and what happens to your data?

During the transition, the old system often needs to remain operational until the new system is fully up and running. Critical data may still reside in the legacy system, and essential processes may depend on it. To ensure a smooth implementation of a new application, including data migration, an integration layer is essential.

With an integration framework, you can build a new front-end application while the old system continues to operate in the background. This allows you to phase out and migrate applications gradually. While modernizing your IT landscape, you can continue using the legacy system as a data source. Migration itself is not innovation, but it enables innovation. Once the transition is complete, you can develop modern functionality and continue to innovate.

Gradually building new functionality

If you keep adding new functionality directly into the old system, you are essentially innovating within your legacy software. Over time, this leads to an increasingly heavy, monolithic system that lacks flexibility and long-term viability. That is why more and more companies are moving away from a single, all-in-one ERP system toward a landscape of specialized tools and applications. But how do you make that shift?

In tropical regions, there is a plant called the strangler fig. It grows around a tree and eventually overtakes it completely, causing the original tree to die. A similar principle can be applied when transitioning to a new system without disrupting business continuity. You build new functionality around the legacy system until all its capabilities have been replaced by new tools and applications. This approach allows for steady modernization without a disruptive big-bang transition.

From migration to innovation

Integration makes the transition to a new system much smoother. A great deal may be happening behind the scenes, but users do not notice the complexity. The alternative approach is to gradually develop new functionality that replaces the old system step by step, ensuring continuous progress rather than a sudden overhaul. In both methods, it is crucial to establish strong connections between the old and new applications and the broader IT landscape.

Would you like to learn how we have supported the largest insurer in the Netherlands for over 20 years with the migration, integration, and innovation of hundreds of applications? You can read more about it in this customer case.