Modernizing a legacy ITSM tool is vital for staying relevant in today’s fast evolving business landscape. This article is an attempt to explain what IT leaders & practitioners need to know about the process.
Staying with a legacy ITSM or Service Management tool may note be the right decision for a company anymore, as all the organizations must modernize their legacy ITSM systems to stay competitive in their industry. The ITSM tools have taken a quantum leap in the capabilities compared to even more recent previous versions. Picking the right approach is important because legacy ITSM modernization demands far more than a few minor upgrades.
Companies should start by evaluating whether a big-bang overhaul is worth the business disruption or a more nuanced approach would be better suited to understand what aspect of their legacy ITSM most needs improvement. Considering the modernization costs is also important, to get the most ROI at the earliest.
There are many costs to not modernizing, as legacy ITSM tools are heavy and rigid with little ability to customize, which makes them challenging to adapt for the agile business of today. Moreover, legacy ITSM tools typically are not integrated with the other tools within the enterprise IT landscape. This deprives the support teams of the ability to coordinate with the other teams or gain information to enable efficient resolution. Also, They have no or little visibility when the issues are escalated through the technical tiers or to Vendors. Other areas impacted are collaboration, automation & knowledge sharing.
Based on the ITIL 4 principles, we have derived few key strategies that combine ITIL 4 framework with modern IT service management platform to improve efficiency, collaboration, and user experience while delivering greater value to the modern digital enterprise.
Here’s a look at the some strategies of modernizing a legacy ITSM tools and how to decide on the right approach.
- Rehost / Replatforming
A company that has outgrown their existing ITSM and is seeing performance start to suffer can consider moving its ITSM system into another infrastructure, such as a new server or cloud service provider, to gain more processing power, faster storage and better networking. For a shift to cloud, the service provider may be a private or public cloud environment that provides infrastructure flexibility. Rehosting also includes upgrading only the hardware or software of the back-end database engine that stores the ITSM data, improving system performance. Replatforming is another option for companies looking to modernize their legacy ITSM tool. For this a company moves to a different runtime platform. - Rearchitect / Rebuilding
Rearchitecting would entail third-party apps to gain functionality that the legacy ITSM lacks, which could potentially solve business issues. For example a company may want to incorporate modern knowledge management practices or a chatbot without changing the existing solution, which can be achieved by incorporating integration between the legacy ITSM and KMS or chatbot. The rebuilding approach includes a review followed by subsequent optimization of existing processes. However, for this strategy, we need to consider rebuilding some of the existing processes, including potentially starting from scratch, while choosing to add new tools to the mix. For example, we may define the current workflows for tiered escalations, either on a whiteboard or virtually, then evaluate each step and look for redundancies or areas to automate and streamline. - Replace or Migrate
The replace or migrate strategy refers to replacing the entire legacy infrastructure with modern system software, hardware and applications including migrating the legacy system to a cloud-native environment. This is by far the most cost efficient
Modernizing legacy ITSM not only improves the security and overall efficiency of an organization but, in most cases, has now become a necessity for businesses to survive. The hidden cost of outdated technologies, as companies work to maintain archaic systems, is quite high. Such costs can be avoided by updating systems and streamlining transformational processes for better flexibility, user experience and performance.
Some of the factors to consider when selecting a legacy ITSM modernization approach are Business risk as each modernization approach carries a different level of risk. Companies that want a low level of risk should choose rehosting and rearchitecting. The two approaches provide the least amount of disruption to existing business processes and focus on optimizing the infrastructure and existing ITSM processes. While a company experiencing severe issues with inefficient processes and workflows should pursue the replace approached, because they can result in major improvements. However, those approaches require a much higher risk tolerance. Similarly, legacy ITSM modernization can demand different types of costs, with some requiring monetary funds and others demanding human capital.
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