Feature
Legacy systems: can’t live with them, can’t function without them.
Mixing tech from different eras is no easy feat. Digital workplace leaders are struggling to marry old-school technology with new-school employees with mixed results.
Working with legacy systems challenges leaders to not only make sure everyone is getting along, but also balance innovation and preservation. Despite the apparent obsolescence of these systems, new hires are often faced with working with a setup that’s been around forever … and that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon.
So what can leaders do to smooth the path between legacy systems and employees? Is it possible to put a more modern interface or a layer as intermediary between old system and new?
What Is a Legacy System?
A legacy system is a generational piece of technology (computer system, application, etc.) that was once likely cutting edge, but now continues to be used long after it becomes outdated or antiquated. Legacy systems are often complicated to replace because they act as the structural foundation for how a company is run.
Rip and replacing these systems is easier said than done. These (relative) relics have become embedded in the organization for a number of reasons, namely:
- Replacement is expensive. Upgrading or replacing entire systems quickly adds up, between the cost of the new system, the resources required for implementation, not to mention the cost of lost productivity and overhead while training large numbers of employees on a completely new interface.
- The system still works. Even with its limitations, a legacy system may still fulfill its purpose,making it harder to justify an upgrade or replacement.
- Data concerns. Some leaders may be hesitant to scrap their legacy system because a complete data migration from old to new can be tedious and risky.
- Dependency. Other, smaller systems may depend on the legacy system to function, making it difficult to replace without complications.
Related Article: Digital Tools Only Work Right If Employees Know How to Use Them
Improving a User Experience From the Cretaceous Period
Sean McDonough, senior solution architect for Akumina, believes one of the primary challenges with newer (and sometimes younger) employees working with legacy systems is staring them in the face — quite literally.
“The UI/UX (user interface / user experience) with legacy systems falls far short of what younger employees have come to expect from our current, modern day graphical user interfaces,” McDonough said. “Instead of working with a mouse and keyboard, clicking on colorful buttons on-screen, many legacy systems have command line interfaces (CLIs). The user experience can be quirky and downright primitive for someone who learned computers through graphical user interface (GUI) interactions.”
To complete a task somewhat intuitively with an older interface, a translation step is needed. In other words, something needs to “click” in order for employees to get used to an outdated system. One of the main things businesses can do (in lieu of replacement) is modernize their application interfaces to make legacy systems easier to work with.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, IT industry expert and founder of Deep Analysis, agrees.
“Simply updating and modernizing a UI can make a world of difference,” he said. “If remote access is required and wasn’t available in the original implementation then you can potentially migrate the legacy system to the cloud. So whether it’s just a dated UI or challenges accessing it, there are pretty straightforward ways to fix those challenges.”
Error Reporting
Legacy systems commonly report status and error conditions through unintelligible computer messages, but it can be difficult for some users to understand them. Once again, they’d have to undergo a mental “translation” to make the code or error message meaningful to them.
McDonough notes that digital workplace leaders can correct this common error reporting using a more intelligent method and error reporting — as well as a more modern interface. Reading something written in plain English is much more palatable than a status code or cryptic message.
Related Article: The Long-Term Impacts of Ongoing Technical Debt
Forget Who, What, When and Why — Understand the How
According to Pelz-Sharpe, one of the best ways to make legacy systems more accessible is reducing the learning curves for newer employees. Although adding a more modern interface may help some organizations, easing that “translation” period is equally important.
Doing this requires a back-to-front understanding of what’s under the hood. Designing a UX for a legacy app follows the same process for any other app with the added challenge of comprehending the “how.”
“There is a strong possibility that a legacy app is not properly documented and it may be that it is built in a structure/architecture that is hard to decipher.” Pelz-Sharpe explained. “It's not so much about the coding language used — there are plenty of ‘translators’ available that you can use to figure that out — but in many instances, all an organization knows about the app is what goes into it, what comes out and why that happens. Exactly how the app works is a mystery.”
When employees understand a system’s inner workings, they’ll have a better sense of how to use the system for current and future needs. This will help improve day to day operations, as well as provide insight into how it can be leveraged more effectively in the future.
Implementing Automation
The good news is many legacy systems can support automation. At a time when modern cloud application suites offer process automation — and the tools to support it — businesses can view this as another option to streamline interactions with an old solution.
McDonough points to Microsoft’s Power Automate as an example. Power Automate is an automation tool that can visually assemble business processes — which can consume data from web services and other endpoints — while also facilitating the movement/transformation of data into other systems through the same mechanisms. Automation tools like Power Automate can construct complex business processes by easily locking services and processing blocks together, almost like Legos.
By embracing automation, employees only need to learn the specific user interface to work with the tool and not go down the rabbit hole of CLIs and other “backward” interfaces.
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Nov
17
KMWorld Washington 2025
Register
Webinar
On demand
AI in Customer Service: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Don’t let rising demand burn out your team. See how to build a smarter, more resilient support org.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Accelerating Healthcare Ops with AI
Sign up to see how your peers are putting AI to work — and making it stick.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Nice-to-Have to Non-Negotiable: Prove the Value of Your EX Stack
Transform your tech stack: prove its value, secure your future.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
The Great Workforce Breakdown (And How to Stop It)
Disconnected employees. Failing communication. It’s time to turn things around.
Watch Now
Related Article: Why Legacy Systems May Force You to Upgrade Your Collaboration Tools
Holding Onto the Past: Is It Worth It?
Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with using a legacy system, McDonough warns against a prolonged reliance. With technology advancing so rapidly, old systems are quickly becoming more obsolete — even if they’re the crux of an organization.
“A legacy system may have been cutting-edge 20 years ago, but most business applications and systems eventually reach end-of-life as declared by their manufacturer. Trying to keep legacy systems functional beyond their end-of-life is risky, as most vendors stop patching bugs and releasing security and other updates,” McDonough said.
From an employee perspective, programmer support becomes rarer as the skill sets needed to work with legacy systems are phased out by more common and modern languages/tools. As the demand and number of resources fade, the cost of maintenance and operations rises.
“I’ve seen many organizations try to keep existing systems operational for too long. Then, when they absolutely must switch over, the organization finds it’s much more expensive, time-intensive, and stressful to move to a modern system – definitely a scenario that can lead to burn-out, turnover and spiraling project costs.” McDonough warned.
To counteract this, leaders must find a way for employees to “play nice” with technology that may not take well to modernization. The combination of emerging talent with aging legacy systems presents a daunting but not insurmountable challenge in the digital workplace.
Whether that be reworking the user experience or implementing automation tools, we’ve learned that organizations can give a legacy structure a sleek, more modernized look to provide a buffer for looming obsolescence.
After all: a legacy system may be old, but it’s still providing needed services. Bridging the gap between generations of technology can make it less intimidating — especially for new hires.
