Monolithic legacy systems were built to deliver stability, not velocity. They were designed in an era of slowly evolving business requirements where a system designed to last a decade or more was justifiable from an engineering perspective. However, as business needs increasingly outpace the capacity of yearly releases to keep up, enterprises are looking to accelerate around composable digital platforms. By enabling organizations to build, replace or scale individual elements within a broader, integrated technology ecosystem, composable systems offer a compelling alternative to monolithic legacy systems that were not designed with the same degree of flexibility in mind.
The Cost of Staying Legacy
Legacy systems are expensive in both technical and opportunity cost. The former is relatively obvious – technical debt, the cost of “bad” design choices and compromises made over years of iterative changes to a system not designed to accommodate them, grows exponentially over time.
The opportunity cost is more subtle but no less impactful – for every new integration or feature added to a legacy system, the time and resources spent developing and testing it represent a direct opportunity cost to the business. This is particularly impactful in an era where the ability to quickly adapt to new competitive pressures, customer demands or regulatory changes is a critical success factor.
This opportunity cost grows exponentially over time in ways that are not immediately obvious to the organization that has become accustomed to its legacy system. If a team has always needed three months to develop a relatively simple feature on its legacy system, there is no context for it to understand what three months of lost development time represents in opportunity cost. It is only when the same feature can be built and deployed by a competitor on a composable digital platform in three weeks that the cost becomes painfully obvious.
What Composability Enables
A composable platform enables organizations to make changes to individual elements within their broader technology ecosystem. This significantly reduces the risk and cost of change, while also unlocking a number of other critical benefits that stem from the ability to treat individual elements as separate, interchangeable systems that are integrated to deliver more value than any could on their own.
A composable architecture decouples individual elements within an integrated technology ecosystem that delivers value to the customer. This decoupling has a number of benefits that extend beyond just enabling changes to individual elements without disrupting the broader system.
First, it allows different elements to be developed and maintained by different teams without any one team needing a comprehensive understanding of the others’ code or internal architecture, thus exponentially accelerating development velocity. Second, it allows the organization to use best-of-breed solutions for individual elements, rather than being constrained to vertically integrated systems where changes to one element necessitate revisions to all others. And finally, it allows individual elements to be scaled independently based on their specific needs, rather than having to scale an entire monolithic system when only one element requires additional capacity.
Making the Transition without Disruption
The transition from a legacy system to a composable digital platform is rarely a binary “rip and replace” decision. This is not to dismiss the option – a clean break can be viable in some circumstances – but rather to highlight the opportunity cost and risk that a large-scale project of this nature represents for an organization. In practice, most successful transitions follow an incremental approach that prioritizes the highest impact legacy elements for replacement first while the rest of the system continues to operate in parallel.
This approach, which is sometimes referred to by the analogy of the strangler fig in technology circles, allows the organization to extract individual elements from the legacy system and replace them with their composable equivalents, one at a time. This incremental approach has two key advantages. First, it significantly reduces risk by avoiding the “big bang” scenario, where the entire system is replaced in a single high-risk, high-cost project. Second, it prioritizes the elements that will deliver the most value to the organization, as measured by the time spent maintaining them or the impact to operations when changes are needed. This approach also tends to be more motivating to the team, as early wins allow them to see progress and begin reaping the rewards of the transition.
Managing the Transition Period
An incremental transition to a composable digital platform inevitably involves a period of coexistence between the legacy system and the new system. This period requires careful management, both in terms of the integration layer between the two systems and the operational and technical considerations specific to managing two systems in parallel.
The integration layer between the two systems should be carefully considered and documented, and monitoring should be implemented to ensure that both systems are functioning as intended. In addition, the transition period should be carefully managed to avoid disruptions to operations. Teams should understand which system is responsible for which functions at any given time, and the risks associated with relying on either system. Organizations that fail to dedicate sufficient resources to managing the transition period risk finding themselves in a worse position than before the transition had begun. This is particularly true if the transition is treated as an “inconvenience” to be navigated as quickly as possible, rather than a critical period of change management that requires additional resources and attention.
The MonoSpear View
MonoSpear provides cloud migration, modernization and application development services that help enterprises transition their legacy systems to composable digital platforms while minimizing disruption to operations. This process typically begins with an analysis of the dependencies within the legacy system to inform the transition strategy. Once the highest priority elements to transition first are identified, MonoSpear develops the appropriate composable architecture, transition strategy and supporting integration layer to support the ongoing coexistence of the legacy and new systems. By adopting an incremental approach to transitioning, MonoSpear helps enterprises reduce the risk and disruption of the transition while still pursuing the long-term goal of a fully composable digital platform.
FAQs
1. What is a composable digital platform?
A composable digital platform is made up of independent, modular elements that can be combined, replaced or scaled to meet changing business needs. It enables organizations to innovate and adapt without the risk and cost of disrupting their entire system at once.
2. Why are legacy systems a risk to the business?
Legacy systems carry both technical and opportunity cost. The former is manifested in technical debt that accumulates as compromises are made to support evolving business needs within a rigid system architecture.
3. Can legacy systems be replaced without disrupting operations?
Yes – a transition to composable digital platforms can be incremental and prioritize the highest value elements, thereby minimizing the impact to operations at any given time.
4. How does MonoSpear support legacy modernization?
MonoSpear supports enterprises in their transition from legacy systems to composable digital platforms through cloud migration, modernization and application development services. This process typically begins with an analysis of the dependencies within the legacy system in order to inform the transition strategy.