3 ways legacy systems hurt your business

Summary: Is your company tied to legacy applications or systems? If so, they could be harming your business. Learn why, along with a simple way to bring modern features to your existing systems.

Is your company tied to legacy applications or systems? If so, what keeps you from modernizing those systems?

Have past customizations locked you in to those legacy applications? Does your business rely too heavily on those systems? Maybe management sees it as too big of a risk?

In either case, I’d argue that running a business on legacy systems is not only risky, it hurts your business. How so? Here are three ways:

1. Legacy systems tie up your budget

How much of your IT budget gets tied up maintaining your legacy systems? Because legacy applications need more maintenance, they often tie up 70-80% of an IT budget.

Think about that. If you’re spending 80% of your budget maintaining the status quo, how can you ever move forward? It’s like riding a stationary bike. You peddle and peddle, but never get anywhere.

2. Legacy systems waste your time

Over time, applications and systems become more complex. Every customization and change adds another layer of complexity to the system. Maintaining these applications only becomes more difficult and time-consuming the older they get.

What does that mean? That means your IT department must dedicate more and more time to maintenance. Every new change becomes more difficult than the last, and runs the risk of breaking other parts of the system.

3. Legacy systems keep you from the benefits of modern technology

If you’re tied to outdated systems and applications, you’re also stuck with outdated features. What types of benefits could you be missing out on? Here are few:

• User-defined dashboards: The user-defined dashboard is a business dashboard that individual users control and customize. Each user sees only the data that they wish to see.
• Event-triggered messaging: This feature lets your applications perform tasks or send messages based on a schedule or event. For instance, you could set it to run and deliver reports on a pre-set schedule, automatically deliver past due notices on delinquent accounts, and much more.
• Mobile applications: Mobile is the future. Can you access your data and applications from any device? Would you like to?
• much more…

How to bring modern features to your legacy systems

I know–you might feel stuck. You want the modern features, but you’re tied to outdated technology. For one reason or another, you can’t replace it.

What can you do?

Here’s one way: Using m-Power’s “extend-and-surround” approach, you can build new features over your existing systems. The best part: It integrates with your existing system, without altering it. To learn more about m-Power and the new features you can add to your legacy system, check out this paper.