Legacy Systems Preventing One In Four UK Businesses From Achieving Agile IT Benefits, Accenture Research Finds

More than one in four (27 percent) UK businesses are unable to take advantage of new agile infrastructure that can scale their IT function to meet the evolving needs of their organisations, because they are constrained by existing legacy systems, according to a new study released today by Accenture (NYSE: ACN).

The ‘Agile IT’ research is based on a study of 500 technology and business executives in the United Kingdom (UK) with responsibility for managing revenues and cost in their organisation. Agile IT – the ability to scale up and down IT resources rapidly to meet changing user and customer needs, reduce costs and help bring new products and services to the market through faster access to variable computing resources – could save businesses nearly one-third of their IT costs, according to a majority (75 percent) of the executives surveyed.

The research shows that legacy systems are causing a number of cost and flexibility issues, as businesses face challenges in managing the agility of new cloud solutions versus the rigidity of core legacy infrastructure and applications. Almost half (45 percent) of respondents said that they need to modernize or replace legacy systems which are impediments to rapidly and flexibly meeting changing user or customer needs. Other highlights included:

• Over one-third (35 percent) of those polled said that they are being held back by current infrastructure, despite the fact that they see ‘cloud computing as a great move’ and thus likely to improve IT productivity
• More than half (66 percent) of technology executives forecast that up to 30 percent of their IT budget is expected to support legacy systems over the next two years
• Four-fifths (80 percent) of organisations revealed that they do not have a fully developed application retirement roadmap, an essential ingredient for successfully moving to agile IT

“CIOs and other technology executives face tough questions about what to do with their legacy infrastructure and software applications portfolio,” said Stephen Nunn, managing director, Infrastructure Consulting Group, Accenture. “IT executives seeking to accelerate their journey to a more agile IT environment need to work closely with their business counterparts to determine whether to sustain, consolidate, modernise, or retire each application that supports a core business function. Conducting an application rationalisation exercise based on the usual criteria but also specific agile IT principles and suitability for cloud technology will identify the best course of action and enable the benefits of agile IT to be realised.”

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