The Flip Side of Forced System Migrations

I spent the majority of the aughts helping organizations move from legacy enterprise systems to more contemporary ones. I even penned a book about the subject.

That experience taught me a great deal, but one truism sits at the top of the list. Individuals, teams, departments, and organizations change systems for two reasons:

1. Because they want to.
2. Because they have to.

In most cases, group motivations fell into the second bucket. Management would have loved to have stayed with its current systems, but—for whatever reason—stasis wasn't an option.

The usual suspects included:

• Vendors sunsetting their existing systems.
• Cost and security concerns.
• A new CXO comes down with a severe case of shiny object syndrome.
• An acquisition or merger.

I didn't keep a formal tally, but I suspect that, three-quarters of the time, employees moving to new systems wanted to exactly replicate their existing business processes to a T—even with new, more powerful tools. If I only had a nickel for every time someone resisted new tech and uttered the sentence, “But that's not how we do it now.”

Change Management