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Innovation vs Comfort of legacy systems | ||
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A while back, a friend of mine recounted to me a nugget of wisdom from an old client who said, "you know what 'legacy system' means to me? It means that it works." Funny. True. ...and when you're in the business of making new and better systems, you run into this sentiment a lot. It didn't occur to me sooner how to elegantly respond to this chestnut, but I think I have it now. By way of analogy, the early adopters of the automobile and the telephone system could easily have fallen back on this way of thinking.  A horse will most likely get you where you need to go and will have fewer breakdowns and no flat tires along the way- you don't even need to use a road. Likewise, an early long distance telephone call could take hours to connect and required a team of operators to synchronize and make it happen... but hey- when you send a letter through the post, it doesn't suddenly cut out half-way through or get merged with cross-talk from another sender. On the downside, you have to put fuel in a horse whether you're using it or not, it has few serviceable parts so when something goes wrong you need a whole new one. Sending a letter takes time and resources to create and can take weeks to get any kind of response. When we look at these changes, we know that (most of) the kinks in the new systems got worked out and we now have it way better than those who rely solely on the legacy systems. Lucky for those of us born after the 19th century, we didn't have to experience the extreme growing pains these early adopters did, but the pattern repeats itself with every new innovation. The change is spurred by an unserved need that is first met by a solution that isn't quite good enough. However, this new solution attacks a problem that motivated early adopters will endure a period of low reliability to solve. Embracing change is hard. Harder for some than others. The wonderful thing about the diversity of the marketplace is there seems to be a healthy balance of early adopters who bring the more conservative risk-averse forward by working through the rough periods of change ahead of them. When you find yourself facing the murky waters of early technology or process change, it might be better to be looking ahead to the time when the new solution works as reliably (but better in most ways) than the legacy system it is replacing. This is healthier in the long run than lamenting over the fact that even though it was slow and ugly, the legacy system "worked". |
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