Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how people work or how they use a system, its just bad. Bad in terms of an unintuitive user experience (user interaction flows) or terrible functionality fit, slow or compromised performance, poor security, inadequate integration, unscalable architecture or a combination thereof.

Unfortunately, quite often companies continue to compound the errors made by previous generations of management and old decisions. More money, more fix-it projects and the businesspeople using the system in question continue to get pressured. The typical justification is that doing a “rip and replace” job is going to be terribly expensive, a huge effort in transition and change management and a significant risk in terms of business disruption.

A lot of this used to be true, till about a decade ago. Now, there are choices that make things different. The development of SOA, composite applications, SaaS, ITO/ BPO and BYOD complicate the IT environment, but completely change the dialogue in the situation above. There is even more reason now to do a quick application lifetime cost assessment along with a  business benefits review accompanied by an ROI analysis that connects the dots. It is pretty compelling when alternate scenarios are defined and the implications spelled out in dollar terms.

Is this your situation? Things could change really quickly if you open the door to these possibilities. Let the businesspeople go free to generate revenue and drive growth!