Srinivas

To help with this conundrum leadership teams must finalize a plan that satisfies the long-term objectives of the organization. To kickstart the plan organizations must help customers perceive the long-term value of the re-write by equipping employees with the knowledge required to pitch it to them in the best possible light. Once this is done, organizational leaders must devise a series of mental models to ensure sanity throughout the migration process for all parties involved. Finally, leaders must design rock-solid customer support strategies to handle post-production issues that might arise and to ensure customer feedback is timely addressed.

A system rewrite may not be viable either because the timing isn’t right or because it’s a matter of business case justification. But when a system rewrite is off the table, CI/CD can be utilized to streamline the code review process and continuously monitor the system’s health. You can even go a step further by rewriting sub-features to reduce technical debt, deploy microservices to better support customers and finally make a move towards a reporting solution such as a data lake to innovate on analytical requirements when the inevitable rewrite finally takes place. Adopting these strategies can help iron out the kinks in your system and restore system stability while parallelly making it fool proof against the legacy demon.

The greatest challenge for re-architecting an enterprise system is understanding and reconciling its current-state to the future-state in terms of business and technical outcomes over time. We suggest your organization starts this journey by redefining core system features and reconceptualize UX to deepen customer relationship. You should then re-evaluate nonfunctional requirements such as compliance and security and re-align enterprise data strategy to improve user experience. Finally, leadership teams must take the initiative to reimagine customer support to help product and engineering teams deliver greater value to end users