Leda Writes for Fintech Futures: What we mean when we talk about legacy

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she turns her attention to legacy mindset, data, architecture and…Dave.

Legacy systems usually span the history of the entire organisation. It’s resulted in architecture so tangled that despite being reliable and familiar, can’t be scaled out. Untangling these systems isn’t a question of patience. It’s impossible. That makes future-proofing an organisation’s infrastructure a huge task that’s almost touching lunacy.

It also makes using legacy data for insights difficult at best. It’s tucked away, buried in a colossal spreadsheet minding its own business. But now you want to use it, finding it and applying it is time-consuming beyond belief. Those spreadsheets exist because of the technology banks didn’t have. They exist because Dave was brilliant and made macros that solved problems technology hadn’t figured out yet.

But then Dave left. And no-one knew how to update his macros. Dave made workarounds for the present which were adopted for the future. You need to bring Dave back. Give him a team that can turn his workarounds into something robust. Something so that in a few years when you’re moving from digital to quantum, you’ll have a much more successful transition.

Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.