The Legacy Trap

Here’s what we see repeatedly: The systems you depend on most accumulate the worst problems.

Not because they were built poorly, but because they work. They became embedded in daily operations. Too risky to change. Too risky to replace.

Changing them? Every modification risks breaking critical business processes - miscalculated transactions, system outages, cascading failures.

Replacing them? Many replacement projects fail. Not because of technical incompetence, but because new systems must support all existing processes, products, and interfaces while working flawlessly from day one - a brutally difficult combination.

So they accumulate:

• Workarounds built on workarounds (because touching core logic is too risky)
• Technologies fewer people understand (declining development work in aging technologies shrinks the developer pool)
• Behaviors nobody can fully explain (original developers left, documentation is outdated or missing, and years of patches created complexity nearly impossible to untangle)

Meanwhile, every change becomes harder. And riskier. Until “never touch a running system” becomes the default answer.

The trap: The systems that keep your business running are now holding you back.