Building On Top Of Old Architecture

Got a legacy system or two? Andrew Liles shows how you can release value from these without starting again

‘Oh, that’ll take months to replace.’ ‘We can’t touch that… [in a whisper]... we really don’t know what it does, let alone how it works.’ I’ve lost track of the number of times clients have said these kinds of things to me. But all is not lost. You can innovate with your existing tech solutions; you don’t have to throw everything away and start from scratch.

Imagine this scenario – quite a few years ago, a factory created piecemeal systems to support its internal functions, such as finance, manufacturing, dispatch, marketing and dealing with visitors. As customers’ expectations have grown, its website has not been kept in check. Now more than half of the business’s traffic comes from mobile or small-screen devices but the website does not properly adapt. And the IT solutions are all glued together but still work in silos, similar to the physical teams – making it almost impossible for them to all serve the same customer. This means that five, 10 or 20 years down the road, the business’s IT systems are now inhibiting its growth.

So how do you adapt? Use the same principles you take while refurbishing a building. Think about when you’ve walked into a meeting room that has just undergone an almost overnight refresh. You are startled and pleased by the instant transformation but if you think about it, you know the building itself has all the same structure, heating, water and electricity.

A plasterboard stud partition can hide a whole load of history and messy plumbing, cabling and ducting. Look a bit closer and you will see the same services but modernised with the help of now-universal sockets. The meeting room now has things such as USB power sources, VGA and HDMI ports for displays. However, behind the scenes, they all feed into the same tangled mess of electrical cables.