Migrating from Legacy IT: Costs, Culture and Fear of Change Roadblock Successful Migrations

Legacy IT systems are a drain on resources for maintenance and a source of end-user frustration with antiquated user interfaces.  But change can be painful. Migration from legacy systems is often difficult.  Just selecting a new system and getting buy-in from all groups can be a challenge on its own.  There’s always the risk too that something in the path of migration can go wrong.  The cost to map and migrate data plus the cost of the software itself can be a big hurdle to get past.  But maybe the biggest challenge to successful migration is people, the way they think, and their business culture.

Consider a recent attempt by the Defense Department to upgrade their ERP system.  After spending billions of dollars on the migration to the new system, a survey found that less than 20 percent of the users see the new system as an improvement over the old one.

Ariane Whittemore, director at Grant Thornton LLP, blamed much of the problem on staff members who don’t want to change their old processes. Even though the new ERP system is working, “a lot of the workload associated with the legacy systems is still there — those systems weren’t retired soon enough. In many cases, the military services and agencies are still a little skeptical about shutting those systems down until they’re sure the ERPs are providing what they need. The concern is not with the ERP systems — they felt those systems are very capable. It’s the fact that they’re having to maintain two duplicative systems and populate data into both.”

Both getting people to accept change and management to have vision that goes past the upfront costs of implementing the migration are needed. It’s no wonder why decisions to migrate from a legacy system often take many months or years before anything happens.

Terry Halvorsen, Defense Department CIO, said that “the way that our legacy software for government off-the-shelf—GOTS—has been written makes it very difficult for them to migrate at times, which is really the crux of the modernization challenge… Culture is an extremely strong and powerful element of modernization within the federal government. It’s getting people in the organization to rally behind the real imperative to modernize. The IT modernization effort is where the adage ‘you have to spend money to save money’ rings true. These technologies create the ability to gain massive efficiencies due to the use of automation and leveraging the innovation of the technology today. It simply requires less personnel and resources in order to get the scale the government needs to create agility and efficiency.”