8 Signs You Need to Replace Your Legacy Enterprise Software
- Linh Le
More and more businesses are making the move from legacy software to more modern alternatives. For many businesses, the pros of such a move outweigh the cons, but this isn’t the case for everyone. Every company has its own software needs, different to those of its competitors, and sometimes upgrading is not worth the time, cost, and effort.
Knowing whether or not your company falls into the the former category or the latter can be challenging. To make it easier for you, we’ve listed the eight main reasons why you should think about waving goodbye to your legacy enterprise system.
1. It Doesn’t Do Everything You Ask It to Do
Enterprise software systems need to support many critical business functions. Business functions tend to change over time. Employees can learn to adapt to changes, but adapting your legacy software may not be worth the cost and effort, if it’s even possible.
Legacy systems may not be able to handle such a new or altered function. Let’s say an organization has made the strategic decision to expand its operations to include one or more foreign markets, but its legacy software doesn’t accommodate financial transactions involving more than one type of currency.
What happens when the enterprise software in place can’t do all that’s required of it? First, a drop in productivity. When software no longer fulfils employees’ needs, they will no longer be able to perform certain tasks easily and may become less efficient at their jobs. Second, increased costs. Employees often have to find “work-around” solutions to cater for missing software capabilities (e.g., additional applications). All this comes at a price.
Alternately, a company may implement a piecemeal solution to aress the requirement that the legacy software can’t fulfill. While this approach sometimes makes good business sense, it can also increase silos (separate software systems that don’t communicate with each other), costs, downtime occurences, and confuse users.
2. Performance Problems
Reliability and uptime are critical to most businesses. Think of business software as a machine on the production line. If the machine is temporarily out of service, the entire production line will be halted until the problem is fixed.
Downtime can and does happen, but it must be minimized. Businesses often wait until the middle of the night or the weekend to launch planned updates or perform planned server maintenance. However, unexpected downtime can occur at any time, often when a large volume of people are trying to access your software or website simultaneously. In fact, outages are often caused by increased demand.
With legacy software, outages and other such issues often become more frequent over time. This can be one of the first signs that it’s time to start thinking about other options.
3. The Technology Fix Isn’t In
Companies adopt emerging technologies to stay competitive, lower costs, meet the expectations of customers and suppliers, or even existing and prospective employees. You should start considering moving on from your legacy software when it can no longer integrate with new technologies your company wants to use.
Say your organization is anxious to take advantage of the internet of things (IoT) to improve its visibility of the supply chain. Until now, you’ve used an inventory management system using radio frequency identification (RFID) that your company’s current software was equipped for, but your system simply can’t accommodate new IoT devices. This leaves you with two choices: you can either migrate to a new system that can provide the needed capabilities, or simply forego adopting the new technology.
The rapid growth of IoT technology suggests that it will soon supplant older technologies and be the standard for maintaining visibility and control at every stage of the supply chain. As a result, businesses involved in supply chain management will have to adopt this technology eventually
4. You Want to Stay Competitive
Keeping up with the competition is often critical for many organizations. Companies are constantly being compared to others in their business category, by consumers, stakeholders, and even potential employees. Legacy software may be harming your company’s image and pushing customers and talent toward those competitors that are keeping pace with modern technology.
These days, customers have expectations that often only new software can help you meet. For example, customers may want to track the status of an order online, without having to pick up the phone.
Easy-to-learn and intuitive software is also likely to be more attractive to prospective hires than older systems. What’s sure is that making apologies for not keeping pace with the times may not be a viable course of action for very long.
5. Lack of External Support
Legacy software is often no longer supported by the developer or vendor. Support may not seem that important, until you really need it. Software developers typically issue bug fixes, security patches, and feature upgrades until a system is no longer widely used. At this point, the software quickly becomes more vulnerable to security issues.
If the vendor of your legacy software no longer offers support, do you have a plan in place in case anything goes wrong? If you can no longer get support from the vendor, your company may find itself in a quandary.
How much time, productivity, and money has been lost due to software issues, downtime, and fixing issues in house? Without vendor support, any software issues, downtime, and in-house fixes are likely to cost you time, productivity, and money, so it could be worth upgrading your solution.
6. Lack of Internal Support
The term legacy software is sometimes used to refer to a system programmed specifically for your company. The trouble is that often only the people who programmed your system know how to use and modify it.
Do you have a plan in place to replace these programmers if they leave your company? Would it be feasible to recruit new developers or train existing employees to work with your legacy software? Recruiting new developers to work on outdated systems may be challenging.
Another consideration is the march of technology and how it affects business priorities. It’s likely that your business requirements will change over time and you will need to bring new technology on board. How will your current system deal with new technology? Will your internal IT support staff be equipped to continue tweaking the legacy system to accommodate each new requirement? These are all questions you should ask yourself to make sure you’re prepared for any eventuality.
7. User Unfriendliness
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Legacy software interfaces are often clunky, complex, and take time to learn to use. This can cause a whole host of problems.
The complexity of legacy software may discourage or prevent employees from trying new things like creating new types of report and exploring the solution’s various features. Training new employees on the software can be time consuming, a drain on resources, and frustrating for employers and employees. Today’s workforce is tech-savvy and used to convenient and easy-to-use technology, and may expect their employer to use the latest technology. What’s more, employees retire and move on, so there will always be a need to recruit fresh talent.
Many companies are now using intuitive, up-to-date solu
tions to remain agile and meet the expectations of their ployee—the very people who will use the software. Often, it’s a question of upgrading your legacy software or losing employees to competitors.
8. Lack of Mobility
Most businesses are fully aware of the importance of mobility and bring your own device (BYOD) computing. Software that allows employees to work from different locations is necessary for those companies that employ field service technicians or personnel that travel frequently, or operate small satellite offices.
For other companies, the need for mobility is just around the corner. More and more employees expect the flexibility to work remotely. More and more businesses are seeing the value in deploying remote workers to get access to the best talent.
Clients also expect the businesses they work with to be mobile. They expect to get answers to their questions at any time, from any place, especially if their own company can access data instantly from a telephone or tablet.
If your legacy software isn’t fully equipped with mobile options, including BYOD, that may another reason to move on.
Is It Time to Upgrade Your Legacy Software?
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is an excellent resource for helping you decide whether to keep or move on from your legacy software, for several reasons:
First, TEC does not produce, sell, or otherwise market any particular software solution. We have no stake in your decision to upgrade, migrate, or keep your current software. Our software selection service can help you decide whether to upgrade or not, and won’t ever try to encourage you to change your legacy software unless it no longer fulfils your requirements.
Second, our goal is to provide you with the research, advice, and tools necessary to find software that best matches your requirements. We’re not affiliated with any vendors and offer 100% impartial advice.
Third, you can rely on our experience and knowledge to help you choose the right software for your business. We developed our software selection methodology over two decades and have helped thousands of companies choose the best software for their needs.
What’s more, once you decide to start evaluating your software options, you can choose how much help you’d like from us. Either have our software selection experts give you partial guidance, or allow us to take care of the whole process for you.
TEC’s website also offers a wealth of valuable and often free research materials, software selection tools, customizable software templates, and comparison reports.