Recent Gartner research has revealed that by 2025, the 80% of CTOs who don’t have the correct tools in place to support business and customer needs or adapt to change will negatively impact their business response to disruption.
The research also showed that executive leaders are currently sharing unrealized dependencies that can help to meet business growth expectations once they are properly identified.
These unrealized dependencies can also function to bridge the multiple capability gaps that exist across the enterprise.
Additionally, it was revealed that even when solutions reach end-of-life, executives chose to upgrade and customize the older systems rather than opting to invest in newer solutions with enhanced capabilities. The unfortunate result of this is the build-up of technical debt without an actionable plan to reduce it.
Research also showed that organizations are finding it more difficult to compete because of the resource demand for more temporary solutions, hindering their ability to innovate, anticipate, and transform to meet the growing needs of users.
In order to fight against these challenges, organizations ensure that ownership is active by assigning accountability for everything, and looking closely at the capability requirements needed to put a strategy in place to locate any weaknesses.
Data-driven decision making should also be prioritized when putting a spend analysis program in place by having employees assemble sources of relevant financial data and analyzing the benefit, risk, and time-to-realization of cost components between legacy upgrade and digital modernization.
The research also stated that organizations should be increasing their investment in newer solutions rather than upgrading older ones because it helps fill gaps and improve agility.
By bringing in compatible solutions with low upfront implementation and configuration costs, leaders can reduce the reluctance that comes with changing solutions.
The research also found that outdated technology can stunt transformation and innovation, preventing the organization from accelerating and growing the way it needs to.
By supporting investments in newer technology and ridding the company of obsolete platforms and solutions, it becomes easier to attract new talent, which translates to an enhanced competitive advantage.
Furthermore, legacy solutions could bring a heightened level of risk to an organization since it is more difficult to update these solutions to comply with the latest standards.
“As well as reducing the risk of downtime through greater resilience, many other commercial and business risks are lowered by working with the latest, most successful solutions and their providers,” the report states.
By clearing technical debt and upgrading to newer technology, businesses also gain several cost benefits in the long run. This is because legacy solutions oftentimes require additional labor costs to support, maintain, secure, adapt, and integrate these older solutions.
For users looking to clear their technical debt and move away from more expensive legacy solutions, Melissa’s customer data platform, Unison, can be helpful.
“For users moving away from expensive legacy technology debt – investing in platform- as-a-service type solutions like Unison that deliver high speed and security in a self-hosted system allows them to take advantage of the entire set of Melissa’s full-spectrum data quality libraries and capabilities in one low code/no code, fully extensible platform,” said Greg Brown, VP of marketing at Melissa.
Furthermore, data quality platforms such as Unison could help identify issues with legacy technical debt by locating current data sources that bring quality problems. This works to improve data source formatting and ensure that data is easy to work with.
To read the full report, click here. To learn more about Melissa’s Unison project, visit the website.
