Modernization of legacy systems Lost Legacy Treasures — PI DX Spotlight, April 2021 Rob Ferrone, Founding Director — Quick Release_ Jonathan Théry — Salomon This is a machine-generated transcript, lightly tidied for readability. Speaker attributions and paragraph breaks have been added; the substance of the talk is preserved. --- HOST: Rob from Quick Release_ and Jonathan from Salomon. They're going to be presenting on "Lost Legacy Treasures", and they have some great images for you in their presentation. Over to you, gentlemen. ROB FERRONE: Great, thanks very much for the introduction. Thanks very much everyone for joining today. This is not going to be a technical presentation — it's more of an adventure story, based on our reflections and observations. We're going to cover challenges, change inertia, alternatives to change, and also successful strategies. Before we get started, I think it's a good time to introduce myself and my fellow adventurer. So here we are — my name's Rob Ferrone, I'm one of the founders at Quick Release_. I've been working with legacy data for about 20 years now. I'll hand over to my colleague Jonathan. JONATHAN THÉRY: Hello everyone. My name is Jonathan Théry. I've been working at Salomon for almost ten years. Today I'm active in business process transformation. Let's see what happens when outdoor sportswear meets the automotive industry — when we are teamed together with different skills and backgrounds, but with a shared mission. Salomon has a legacy — a physical legacy. The guy you see is Georges Salomon, the founder of the company. He had the idea back in 1947 to move from producing saw blades to producing metal ski edges. So you can imagine that we have a physical heritage, and beside that we created a lot of legacy systems. What is a legacy system? A legacy system is something you carry on with you all the time. Something you have on your shoulder — sometimes without even knowing you have it, and without knowing what's in it, or, if you know it, how to deal with it. So we can look at legacy systems from different angles: are they a liability, a burden, or a source of opportunities? With Rob, we want to see it as a treasure. But, as for all treasures, you must avoid some traps to take the benefit. It's like a quest. To start, you need to team up with experts. You need to be curious. You need to be able to cope with risk. All of that will help you overcome a path full of pitfalls. You also need to face all the voices saying that you cannot succeed and that you won't succeed. So, Rob — what are the other challenges? --- ROB FERRONE: Thank you, Jonathan. Obviously, this is a famous scene from one of the Indiana Jones movies. When we talk to our customers, they're not being chased by boulders — but they often describe their legacy systems as something that's weighing them down. It's something they have to carry, and it stops them from being more agile and holds them back. The key challenge is really how you build and adapt on that legacy in order to derive mobility and create seamless connectivity, all with the least amount of legwork. One of the other challenges is that clients talk about their legacy systems being inflexible, and not up to the pace of the modern world. In fact, many of the legacy systems were designed for technical people. It wasn't technology that was for design people. The history is that, first, these systems were very much an IT-focused thing. Over time, engineering and departments like finance got pulled in. Finally, the creative types are being asked to engage with the enterprise architecture — and although many of these creative types dress like they're from the 80s, they don't want to use 80s tech. JONATHAN THÉRY: New people in companies don't necessarily like the old interface or the experience around legacy systems. But it's one of the first things you see, and that you interact with, when you start in a company — when you're onboarded. The interface doesn't get better with time on its own, just like wine does. Another challenge is that you have people promoting automating legacy systems that can be used completely automatically without human actions, just like in Back to the Future. But sometimes you already have alternative solutions available, in the real world, in your company — to combine new technologies and new ways of adding value to your legacy. Legacy systems are not new by definition, and people assume that new is better, that new is more ergonomic. There is also a time element here: people don't know how it works in a detailed way. Companies lose the knowledge of how to run, how to update systems over time, how to access data, and finally, just how to change — when all those people are gone. One other risk, which is a very good reason to change, is if the security of your legacy systems is not maintained — if your systems are not secure enough in the world we are living in. --- ROB FERRONE: So, Jonathan talked about making the change. Let's have a little look now at why it's so hard to change. Quite often, it's simply too daunting. You have a legacy system which is complex. You don't necessarily know where to start, and it's complex on many levels — technically complex, complex from a business perspective — and you can even face resistance from the team. We've seen many presentations here at PI DX about the challenges of implementing PLM. That's not easy, even when you start from a greenfield. Any IT team will tell you that you have to be careful what you touch in the system. OK, you might not be hit by poisonous blow-darts or fall into a pit of spikes — but if you stop the production line because you've changed something in the system, which had unpredicted consequences, a pit of snakes is perhaps a better alternative. JONATHAN THÉRY: A good way to navigate the risk is to know the risk. It's better to know what you are going to deal with than not knowing. Thinking that you have a solid and strong castle and architecture, and that in the background you have an unstable castle of cards as a foundation, is very dangerous. Don't forget that legacy systems are also often closely linked to your company culture. Another risk is that we are so used to the things we know and the things we use every day, that we might not know what is critical till it's gone. Crazy, in the sense of frightening, things can happen — if your shoelaces get eaten by a porcupine during a backcountry hiking trip, for example. ROB FERRONE: Now, I'm sure this is something that Emily can associate with — but imagine trying to declutter your activewear wardrobe. And it's the same with data. If you're trying to replace a legacy system, what data do you keep? What data do you get rid of? Are you sure about that? You open the door to your cellar or your loft or your wardrobe and you have a look, and sometimes you think: actually, do you know what, this is just too hard. And you shut the door again. And finally, there's also the issue that everyone is faced with, and that's actually creating the business case to do the change in order to get the budget. --- JONATHAN THÉRY: So, what alternatives are there to changing over to a new system? One alternative: look at this bike. Would you use this carbon racing bike to go shopping? But actually, it's what we do sometimes with the so-called legacy systems. We have racing power that we can use, but that is underused. One of the alternatives is to first train on your existing systems and software, and invest the right amount of time and money to make the most of them. Another example from the real world is like building or using what you do best before thinking about buying new, fancy and appealing systems. You can explore new solutions — for example, using APIs to connect your existing system to external models. It's a kind of "give your husband or wife a second chance". For example, here with Salomon, we have Rihanna wearing a ten-year-old Salomon shoe that is becoming the most fashionable shoe suddenly. It's something from our closet that we just put back on the market. Another example for Salomon: lacing systems. Like combining the functions and adaptability of your legacy — and here, traditional laces — with safe and powerful wire technology from paragliding. So Rob — do you have any other examples of technologies that can enhance our legacy? ROB FERRONE: Some of you may have seen the news announcement — I think it was yesterday or the day before yesterday — by a company called SuitX, which talks about bringing to the market the exoskeleton. There's a good example of taking something and giving it more power. And there's also the question of how you change the user interface so that you can take a legacy system and put something on top of it and actually make it more accessible, just like this arcade-iPhone. --- ROB FERRONE: Let's think about some transition strategies. If you want to be successful, I think first and foremost, it's about getting the team on board. I think you've probably seen this cartoon on LinkedIn a few times. It's got to be strong leadership from the top, and you have to get the team involved. The team have to have a voice, they need to be — they need to understand why you're changing, and they need to understand that they're a part of the change as well. It's also taking the time to understand the people who have been in the business for a long time — the people that understand the legacy systems, the people that love them. Understand why they love them, and what they do that you perhaps don't know about. JONATHAN THÉRY: People might think also that legacy systems are not as adaptable and flexible as new systems. Here, a good example: a discussion I had with my grandmother during the first lockdown. She was using Zoom for the first time, and she wanted to use it to get in touch with us. So she was curious to use new technology, and we managed to do it. At the end, she said she just wanted to know how it works. So we created a connection between a legacy — an important legacy — and new technologies. That's very powerful, and it's based on curiosity. So curiosity needs also to be used to spend time to understand what the business needs — your business — because you need to do a gap analysis. You need to have a team that spends time to look on the map of what is existing. And how do we do that? We need to do it with the precision of a computer — with a logic of zero and ones, yes and no — and the precision of a relay race, where you need a lot of investment to prepare the race. You can fail during training, you can try many times, but you have a very limited space and time zone to pass on the relay. So training and failure are key to being ready for race day. Rob, how could we also pass the relay? ROB FERRONE: Yes. I mean, here's obviously a picture of Jonathan and I after completing the first stage of one of our triathlons. This picture is really trying to illustrate that, in the same way you make transitions in triathlons, you have to think about: OK, when do you switch over? Are you going to switch over at the start of a new project? Do you switch over one business at a time? There are many other ways of making the transition. It's important to say, this might be the best-case scenario — a digital transformation machine, a system transformation machine — but this doesn't exist. It actually looks a bit more like this, where it's an endurance marathon, and you might find yourself kind of crawling over the line. JONATHAN THÉRY: Yeah, so transformation — you might know that. Just to say that legacy and transformation around legacy is a form of art. You can make of it what you want. It's super technical, but it's also a highly creative process where you need brain connections, and you need a lot of human interface. So, just before Rob and I ride off into the distance with all the treasures — are there any questions? --- HOST: Thank you, gentlemen, for that very interesting presentation. Loved the images you guys had. We've had a couple of questions come in. I'll just jump into the first one. When you look at legacy data, how do you pinpoint where to start? Is it a set process or different for each set of data? You touched on sorting the wardrobe — but what was your process? JONATHAN THÉRY: I think it's important to embrace complexity and be exhaustive. Everything that is not listed won't be on the map — that's for sure. So you need to make sure you will be exhaustive, and that each and every data element will be checked as needed for the next stage or not. ROB FERRONE: To echo that, I'd say it's important to get around the team, the people using the data, because there'll be a limit to what you know about the information and the systems. Something that you think is not valuable is something that is critical to one of the people in the business that's adding value. HOST: Lovely, thank you. How do you best go about building a business case to overhaul these huge sets of legacy data? ROB FERRONE: You have to link it to a strategic enterprise priority. So it's got to be somehow linked to something that's valuable to the business, whether it's creating the connected enterprise, digital transformation — and not just digital transformation for the sake of digital transformation. What is that going to deliver? What new value is it going to unlock? JONATHAN THÉRY: Enterprise strategy must be linked to a real-life use case. Real people asking questions like: how do you access data? Do you need to clean data? And how much time do you spend doing that? Aggregating all the time spent to work on unclean data, not-available data, is a very good use case to move. HOST: Thank you. Jonathan, what resistance have you had in your own company when you have been modernising systems? JONATHAN THÉRY: Well, one of them is "why do we need to change?" It's kind of hard to talk about something that doesn't exist today, but that we think should exist — based on what we know, based on what we have read, and based on exchanging with people like Rob and other industries. That's one of the major issues we have. The other one is hiding behind words like "digital transformation" or "artificial intelligence". That's a kind of very negative marketing for what you are trying to build, which is, as I said, something very exhaustive and very time-consuming and everyday work. HOST: Excellent, thanks. I've got a question that's come in for you, Rob. I thought that Quick Release_ works solely with automotive clients. What has been the biggest difference working with an apparel industry when it comes to legacy? ROB FERRONE: One of the biggest differences is: everything is different! It's been a really exciting opportunity for us because we were learning how a new world works. Joking aside, I think the fundamentals of information flow are the same. At the end of the day, you're always trying to get the right information to the right people, in the right format, at the right time, to get the right outcomes. So I think you can take the logic of what we do and apply it to different industries. But yeah, the apparel one has been very exciting — but a steep learning curve. HOST: Excellent, thank you. We hear a lot about, when we're looking at modernising legacy systems, that you have to almost try and predict what the future space of your organisation is going to be like, to ensure that the technology you're invested in now isn't redundant again in another five to ten years. Jonathan, in the apparel industry, what are some of the drivers you're seeing in how consumers want to interact with the apparel products they use? And how is this impacting your digital transformation efforts? JONATHAN THÉRY: One of the projects we are working on is giving access to more data together with the product — so delivering a physical product together with digital experience, and together with metadata, a full set of data. For example, maybe the best example is a sustainability index together with the product. That's a huge driver of transformation. It's a good example because the numbers, the index that we use, will be the same for the consumer and the same for the people creating and designing the products. So we'll be able, directly from designing the product, to make the decisions to meet our sustainability targets. HOST: Lovely, thank you. So you guys mentioned in your presentation about keeping the team happy. What we hear a lot about in our meetings is change management — and getting your team on board is one of the biggest challenges with any transformation or modernisation project. What would you suggest to people who are undergoing a modernisation project, and they need to put in a change management strategy? JONATHAN THÉRY: I would say: negative feedback is better than no feedback. It's almost like designing user experience. You put something on the market — you put a minimum viable product — and from there you start building on it. If you have nothing to start discussing around — even if it's negative, but negative in the sense of "we can make it better" — then we have nothing to start. So we take everything, but we need to be able to have those feedbacks emerging. And then our role is to collect all the dots, and then connect all the dots and all the needs. HOST: Excellent, thanks. Rob, from your experience, what sort of advice would you give companies who are looking to start on their modernisation projects? ROB FERRONE: From the organisational change perspective, it's about intimacy. You have to be close to the people in the business that are going to be affected by this change — there's no way around it. The more time you invest up front with being close to people, the more open they're going to be, the more direct communication you're going to have. So invest up front, and that will save downstream. From the business perspective, you really just have to be focused on what this is going to deliver for the business. You have to have a solid value case — and that can't be enough just to get the thing moving. You actually have to then deliver on it, and prove that that has happened. If you've not delivered it, then you have to keep going until you deliver it. HOST: Excellent. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen, for your presentation and for answering our questions here today. It was very interesting. Thank you to everyone who sent in your questions. Thanks again, Jonathan and Rob. ROB FERRONE / JONATHAN THÉRY: Pleasure. Thanks very much for having us. Take care.