Ditch the legacy, embrace the agile, says Accenture

18 Jul 2012

Survey of UK executives shows that legacy systems are a major impediment to plans reduce IT costs and more closely align IT with business.

The company’s Agile IT research, based on a survey of 500 UK technology and business executives at companies with more than 1,000 employees, finds that legacy systems come with a host of cost and flexibility issues and hamper cloud strategies as well. Almost half (45 percent) of respondents said that they need to modernize or replace legacy systems that present impediments to their organisation flexibly meeting changing user or customer needs. Over one-third (35 percent) said that they are being held back by current infrastructure, despite the fact that they see ‘cloud computing as a great move’.

In terms of cost, two-thirds (66 percent) forecast that up to 30 percent of their IT budget is expected to support legacy systems over the next two years, and 80 percent do not have a fully developed application retirement roadmap, which Accenture calls “an essential ingredient for successfully moving to agile IT”.

“CIOs and other technology executives face tough questions about what to do with their legacy infrastructure and software applications portfolio,” said Stephen Nunn, managing director of Accenture’s infrastructure consulting group.

“IT executives seeking to accelerate their journey to a more agile IT environment need to work closely with their business counterparts to determine whether to sustain, consolidate, modernise or retire each application that supports a core business function. Conducting an application rationalisation exercise based on the usual criteria but also specific agile IT principles and suitability for cloud technology will identify the best course of action and enable the benefits of agile IT to be realized,” he continued.

Organisations that are looking to deploy agile IT solutions, meanwhile, were clear about what the main drivers for their business would be. Over half felt that transforming fixed IT infrastructure and operational investments could bring improved IT flexibility (55 percent) and better align IT with real business needs (52 percent). Over half (52 percent) also believed it would reduce overall IT costs.

Nunn concluded, “Agile IT can transform how business is done by making it easier for knowledge workers to access the information they need, when they need it, and to collaborate more effectively with others both inside and outside the organisation. CIO's looking to capitalise on the benefits should prepare for a transition to a new agile IT infrastructure by implementing a governance process and an application roadmap for modernising legacy IT. This will enable them to integrate new solutions more rapidly and gain the ability to ‘plug-and-play’ their core software functions.”