In today’s technological age, business systems and developments are often changing and updating, particularly in large corporations and enterprises where data management, efficiency in processes and performance metrics are all key. Updating your business systems from old to new, no matter how large or small your business is, can mean a progressive step forward – but it also can mean that you want to retain some parts of your older systems that are still beneficial to your business or that are necessary to keep it functioning properly.

Legacy systems, for example, are typically no longer used by an organisation, but still remain valuable because of their importance in regards to the company’s history and records and their impact on business reporting and analyses. For this reason, companies often opt to retain old legacy systems, especially if they have not migrated the old data into the new system.

Questions

When deciding which parts of your old systems to keep, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the key benefits of the new system? And what will be lost in the transition from the old system to the new system?
• Do I require access to my historical data on a regular basis for either every operations or for reporting purposes?
• Are my old systems crucial to any procedures or processes in the way my company operates?  And do my end users still require access to these processes? How much visibility is needed and how often?
• Is this old system in any ways more efficient than the new system I want to implement?
• What kind of updates and maintenance will be conducted on the old system and at any time, will a lack of maintenance or support render the old system unusable? And if so, how is my business going to access the required data?

Keeping Old Systems

Keeping various parts of old systems may benefit your business greatly, but you will also need to decide how your staff are going to retrieve the necessary information or execute the desired processes and procedures once the new system is up and running.

You may choose to provide access to the older systems via a terminal emulator or something similar or set up specific hardware or a dedicated computer for staff that still runs based solely on your old system or that is capable or executing the necessary strategies or tasks using the “old” method.

Training

If you do choose to keep some parts of your old systems and use these simultaneously with your new systems, you will need to provide your staff with adequate training, particularly on how to access the retained parts of your old system.

An online induction course may be enough to cover this and which give staff the flexibility to do the training in their own time or you may choose to hold the training in larger, group sessions. This, of course, is in addition to providing training for the new system as well. Subsequently, you will also need to make sure that training for the old and new systems is both available and relevant for current staff and new employees too.