The legacy problem in government agencies

Abstract

Government organizations continue to be heavily reliant on legacy systems to support their business-critical functions. When practitioners embark on legacy systems replacement projects, they tend to use the legacy software's features as business requirements for its replacement application. This unnecessarily reproduces the business processes that have often emerged from the very technical limitations of the legacy system that is being phased out -a phenomenon referred to as the "legacy problem." Public agencies are missing opportunities for innovation when they carry out legacy replacement projects in this conservative manner. Overcoming the legacy problem is "wickedly" difficult because of the complex interrelationships of information technology, organizational culture, and government agencies' normative environments. This paper reports on the use of an online survey and qualitative interviews with practitioners in government agencies to explore the legacy problem. The data revealed that public agencies tend to regard legacy system replacement projects as a distinctly technical issue, and that they do not engage in systematic practices to ensure that unnecessary carryover of the business model embedded in legacy technology does not take place. As a result, legacy feature carryover occurs frequently, because practitioners want to minimize business process changes during new system implementation. The study findings single out the procurement of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software as the most common approach to the replacement of legacy systems. When COTS packages are implemented, vendors (technology providers) shape the requirements discussion and the business analysis surrounding feature selection and customization. These study findings can be instrumental when devising solutions to assist agencies in dealing with the legacy problem.

Requirements analysis gamification in legacy system replacement projects

“…The environment of bureaucratic and legislative rigidity in which public agencies operate [10] and the legacy technologies used in such agencies mutually reinforce each other in ways that make it hard to "disentangle" operational (or business) dimensions from technological (or software) functions and structures. In previous work, we have defined the "legacy problem" as the uncritical replication of legacy systems in the requirements for applications that supersede them [6]. Such replication is intended to minimize the changes to business processes which were shaped by the technological constraints of those same legacy systems.…”

“…We identified a dearth of academic publications dedicated explicitly to the significance of requirements practices in government agencies and their unique challenges in the context of digital government and also of research in the requirements engineering field which deals specifically with tools and methods to overcome the legacy problem. To bridge this gap we conducted a survey and a series of qualitative interviews [6] to explore the extent and dynamics of the legacy problem in government agencies, the insights from which informed our approach to developing a gamified tool to be applied in the context of legacy system replacement in government agencies. Key findings from those studies indicate that practitioners tend to use the descriptions of features of legacy systems as requirements for the new technologies that are supposed to replace them, motivated primarily by the wish to minimize the risk associated with changes to business processes.…”

“…The focus is transferred from the individual performing game actions to the game actions themselves. Also, the respondents to a survey we conducted, reported in [6], indicated that the position of key project actors in the organization's hierarchy impacted the quality of participation in requirements activities, with project participants being less likely to be critical of the direction of a legacy system replacement project during meetings with executives and senior management present. Therefore, we have deemed anonymity a potentially critical element common in the design of both serious and entertainment-focused games, which is worth considering in the legacy problem solution space.…”

“…In fact, it is a common vicious circle in which new replacement systems are customized to accommodate existing business processes in government agencies often shaped by the technological limitations of the very same legacy systems being phased out. In our research, we have defined this phenomenon as the "legacy problem" [6]: due to its circular nature, compounded by government agencies' bureaucratised decisionmaking processes, it can be seen as exhibiting characteristics of "wickedness" [17,71].…”

“…This paper is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation [4]. The definition of the legacy problem was previously published in [6], with its bearing on requirements engineering discussed in [5]. The original, unpublished, content of this paper concerns the design of RE-PROVO and its evaluation in real-world practice.…”