Room for partners to break agencies from ‘vicious’ legacy system cycle

Australian government agencies can find themselves entering a “vicious cycle” when it comes to legacy systems.

However, partners have a clear opportunity to help agencies break the cycle, according to information management solution vendor’s OpenText’s report Retiring Legacy Applications and Databases: Proven Strategies for Government Agencies, developed with A/NZ public sector research firm Intermedium.

Many agencies are facing “significant challenges migrating from outdated applications and databases to contemporary solutions, even with awareness of the risks and costs of the status quo”, the report said.

“Government agencies across Australia are under increasing pressure to deliver faster, more secure and citizen-centric digital services,” said OpenText Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) vice president George Harb.

If agencies fall to that pressure, they can succumb to what the vendor referred to as the “vicious cycle”, where agencies face resource constraints, which then results in reliance on legacy systems.

This can then lead to growing compliance and security risks, causing bottlenecks and rising costs. Then, resource constraints arise and the cycle repeats itself.

The report provided a range of risks for agencies that hold onto legacy applications and databases. These range from cyber security concerns, non-compliance, increased difficulty in accessing data and information for decision-making, vendor-lock in and poor employee productivity and frustration.

Other risks include the inability to innovate, lack of agency objective support, service failures, high maintenance costs, inefficient energy usage, complex machine of government changes, customer disengagement and slow speed to value.

Partner considerations

This is where partners can come into the picture, with the report recommending that agencies find partners with proven experience in decommissioning and modernisation.

Like with any IT project, the report recommended for government agencies to build an “unassailable” business case, which partners should keep in mind when tailoring their pitches.

“Governments are seeking to scale back existing digital and ICT projects and are approving fewer major new initiatives, the report said. “In this tight budget environment, agencies need to present robust business cases to secure funding.

“Agencies can align proposals with one or more of the government’s four core investment drivers to increase the likelihood of approval, whether pitching to agency executives or competing in the Cabinet budget process.”

Those four drivers, the report continued, include attending to neglected core services, managing government finances responsibly, adapting future needs and growing the economy.

The OpenText report cited the federal government’s 2019 Independent Review of the Australian Public Service, which said that typically, 80 per cent of an agency’s budget is dedicated to running systems, including legacy applications and data bases – more than in sectors like banking and finance.

“While successfully retiring legacy systems and transitioning to modern platforms involves much more than just adopting new solutions, having the right enabling technologies is critical,” the OpenText report said.