What legacy tech teaches IT leaders about projects that last

Modernization and transformation are the IT imperatives of the day. Rationalizing applications, reinventing business processes, capitalizing on the cloud — all point to legacy systems as the dead weight and sunk costs modern day IT organizations must move beyond to reach their digital potential.

As an IT professional, I too have at times thought about legacy systems like the high school cafeteria food we all remember — something to complain about even if we know we can’t get through our day without it. The IT perspective is that legacy systems aren’t flexible. They’re resource hogs, and they are or rely on outdated technology. They’re costly and hard to integrate with, and the vendor has you locked in because you’ve custom-built so much code around these systems that you can’t afford to get rid of them.

But there is another side to legacy systems, and it has something vital to teach IT leaders about delivering IT projects that last.

The legacy of legacy tech

A legacy system is commonly classified as a system that is ten or more years old. Mainframes for sure fall under this definition, but so too do servers, smartphones, Oracle databases, and the Microsoft Office Suite, to name a few.

All these systems remain productively employed by companies around the world today. They continue to deliver value, and this value contributes to their staying power.

A CIO acquaintance of mine at a large hospitality chain gives a practical example. “I’ve had a number of servers fail in my data centers, and then there’s our mainframe, running code that was written over 30 years ago,” he said. “It has never failed.” In his operation, the mainframe is the heart of the company. It processes hundreds of thousands of revenue-producing hotel reservations that come in each day.