There’s an impulse to roll one’s eyes and think of legacy applications as problematic, almost by definition. They’re old, and they may run on hardware that’s slower or more difficult to maintain. But in many instances, that’s too simplistic an assessment. Would you respond the same way to an older bottle of a Grand Cru Bordeaux?
For many state and federal agencies, the data and the processes associated with legacy applications take on a similar rarified value. There may be years of insights bound up in that older database, processes that have been tried, tested and streamlined over years of use. That data and those processes may be an essential part of what enables an agency to meet its stakeholder needs. Rather than viewing it as a creaky old system that should be replaced, it’s worth looking instead at modernizing how users interact with it.