Your old platform is mission critical. But decades of technical debt, loss of talent, compounded by fragility of the old technology puts you in a difficult dilemma. Do nothing and you can be sure that there will be a significant issue at some point and your business will fall to its knees. Try to update this legacy application and risk cascading impacts that you won't understand. Most organizations that have been around for at least 15 years will face this situation.
The natural solution typically picked is what I call the abandonment strategy. Build a brand new solution to replace the old instead of trying to decipher a decrepit and unsupported application. It makes perfect sense - more supportable, more talent in the market place, able to take advantage of advances of nascent technologies, improved capacity to meet customer demand. But this is seldom successful.
What typically goes wrong?
Schedule overruns. The new solution typically takes significantly longer than expected. Over time, the organization finds itself stretching meagre resources across two things: a new application that is not living up to its promise and a legacy application that is even more poorly managed and thus even more likely to create the catastrophic issues I alluded to earlier.
Inability to shift customers to new platforms. Changing customer behavior is often complicated and difficult. Therefore even in cases when the new application is successfully built, organizations end up struggling to transition customers away from the old platform to the new one. Again, this ends up splitting the organization's resources across the new and the old, sometimes with devastating consequences.
Loss of customers. It is sometimes taken for granted that customers will faithfully move from your old platform to your new one. Often, customers use this opportunity assess their new situation and migrate to a to different platform that better aligns with their needs.
Newer but unsupportable. I have seen several occasions where the newer future-ready platform has in fact ended up being less supportable. Sometimes the culprit is just designing a poor solution, selecting the wrong technology and deploying the wrong architecture. Most times, however, the problem is due to a mismatch between talent and the target solution architecture. For cutting edge technology, talent may be scarce. An organization may struggle to afford, attract and retain scarce talent.
Loss of talent. Building new solutions is intended to alleviate support risk. Ironically, it often catalyzes the opposite. Some people (often those left tending the old application) leave fearing loss of their job, others, others may leave out of frustration (feeling excluded from the new) or even the burn out that comes from building a new solution compressed timeframes. Yet others may be terminated by newer management or leadership that may not fully understand the domain knowledge or criticality of each employee.
Organizations with a failed abandonment strategy often find themselves in a difficult situation. Stuck between old and new. Internal costs mounting. Slowly bleeding both customers and talent. But this does not have to be the norm. There are several strategies to prevent this pain.
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