Over time, we consistently hear feedback from our class participants, alumni, community, and clients, “You’ve got to share more of Charlie’s thoughts about this!” We have been looking for additional ways to provide Charlie’s insight to our leadership community and plan to do even more going forward. As we organize new resources and go back into our archives, we find that we already have a lot of great stuff – stories, articles, speeches, videos, presentations, workshop content and more. In all, Charlie’s insight and advice continue to be relevant and applicable to today’s challenges. That’s why we’ve decided to start a series we’d like to call “Back To The Future”.
Some of the resources we’ll share in this series will be from long ago; some are more recent. All of them will be great reminders of the key principles, patterns, and experience that Charlie shares with us every day. In my opinion, they are powerful not only because of the way he spins a story and translates complex ideas into simple yet meaningful lessons, but also because he’s been learning, adjusting, and reinforcing this wisdom for decades across industries and dozens of transformations.
Topic: Portfolio Modernization
Timeframe: May 2019
Place/Context: Dialexa Executive Speaker Series
Click here for the entire video on this topic.
Connecting the Dots
We know that portfolios of legacy systems are so important – in good and bad ways. The good news is that legacy systems tend to have great, and sometimes unique competitive advantage, IP in them. This is how we run our businesses. This is how we achieve functional excellence. The tough part is that these legacy systems (and the infrastructure they ride on and the “hairball” of interconnection between them) make our IT estates expensive, risky, fragile, and make us slow to respond to business change. We have to both invest in new AND continuously improve, modernize, decouple, re-architect, replace, re-host, refactor the legacy base. If we do, then we can become efficient and productive (instead of expensive), secure (instead of risky), solid (instead of fragile), and agile to change (instead of slow). While this may be easy for IT leaders to understand it can be difficult to sell to our business partners and difficult to execute.
More From Charlie
From Charlie’s recent blog post Thriving in Dynamic Times: Turning Headwinds into Tailwinds Part 6: Portfolio Modernization.
The Challenge
It never feels like the right time to invest in simplifying, modernizing, re-architecting, or replacing existing assets that seem, on the surface, to be working okay. Even in good or normal times, budgets are tight, and it always seems more exciting and productive, in the short-term, to focus investment on developing new capabilities or buying the next shiny object or building something with the latest new tools.
The Time is Now
It’s definitely time for some counter-intuitive thinking, selling, investing, and acting. We’ve got to find a way to sell Portfolio Modernization into a huge headwind where many companies, in critical industries, will be very strapped for investment dollars or mindshare to focus on the embedded IT landscape. However, in the bigger picture, this is a ticking time bomb. There may not be a next time for some.
Most of us have seen the future of the “Modern Era” accelerate in just the last 4-6 weeks. Online shopping, banking, learning, entertainment, meetings, etc. are not new. They were all evolving. Now they have all accelerated. The biggest lasting change won’t be the doom and gloom of COVID-19. We’re going to emerge from the current crisis mode sometime soon, and the digital era will have leapfrogged to 2023. So, it’s time to “tack into the wind” and not only sustain but also increase and accelerate your Portfolio Modernization efforts. Those who don’t will find themselves really out of position, still with the rigidity that inhibits change and agility and a cost structure they can no longer afford, while the future shows up even sooner and faster than we ever anticipated pre-COVID-19.
Author: Jon Feld, COO, Principal
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