Successful Digital Organizations Reinvigorate Legacy Applications

Most organizations are stuck up a tree with old, tired or lazy legacy applications. There are several approached to dealing with these difficult applications. One is to understand exactly what these applications do or don't do. Another is to wrap an leverage all or parts of these tired applications. Last resort is to convert all or part of  all of these tired applications.

Understand Your Legacy Applications:

Your legacy applications have important policies, rules and constraints that enable and implement business operations. Understanding how these rules affect resources and constituents will help organizations to determine the disposition of this business logic and the actions they control. For organizations that want to reorganize, eliminate or leverage this business logic, understanding the logic and it's relation to resources can be a great advantage for mission critical or business differentiating action. Some enlightened organizations carry out intelligent portfolio analysis to understand the inventory of software they own and use.

Surround, Leverage and Differentiate Your Legacy Applications:

Legacy applications can be leveraged in new contexts and under new interfaces to deliver better and smarter business operations. Organizations that are on a transformation journey often leverage legacy applications in new combinations, sequences and contexts (social, mobile, cloud). Quite often BPM methods and technologies are employed to leverage all or portions of these legacy applications. This is a common approach that is reaching ubiquitous levels. Enlightened organizations slowly replace the legacy applications over time.  

Convert Your Legacy Applications:

There are technology assists that help convert portions of legacy applications. While there are few pure automated conversions (exceptions include simple platform conversions), there are some automated supports for partial conversions. This can give organizations a way to reduce the heavy manual conversions and give a jump start to the manual efforts. Enlightened organizations use both automated and manual approaches to create reusable services or agents for future usage.  

Net; Net:

There are many ways to leverage old legacy applications, from understanding to re-platforming, for enlightened digital organizations. There are many organizations that have or are addressing legacy applications. These organizations are breathing new life into critical applications and retiring some of the old tired applications.

Additional Behaviors of Successful Digital Organizations:

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