The speed of change in multi-channel retail is exceptionally fluid and dynamic today.
The world of digital can be a veritable minefield, especially when your company is trying to keep up with all those trendy start-ups who seem to be nibbling away at your company with those bright ideas and agile innovative thinking.
Legacy systems are not just about technology, people have in-built legacy mindsets, and these mindsets always take an inside out approach which inevitably becomes the blocker to any real transformation or change.
This isn't business enablement, this isn't consumer centric, this really isn't transformation - it's being opportunity averse.
Few IT leaders have the in-house talent to build the bleeding-edge technologies that many digital initiatives require.
Legacy systems in organisation can breed 'legacy thinking' or the often heard view 'if it's not already in our systems, how do we bolt it on'. This isn't a criticism it's more of a personal realistic observation based on many years of being called in to help understand 'transformation' delivery from a brand and people perspective.
My team and myself once built the UK's 5th largest e-mail marketing company, how we did it is for another blog, but it's highly relatable to this subject matter.
The motivation came from utter frustration around not being able to deliver a cost effective e-mail marketing platform in time to assist with migrating circa 2m customers from the offline space onto our new eCommerce platform for what was then the UK's most successful 'Direct Home Shopping Company'.
Following numerous in-house long winded meetings with the IT team who were already busy keeping the IT lights on, then holding a beauty parade of existing ESP's (e-mail service providers) we worked out it was never going to be cost effective or feasible to deliver on the first phase of our 'transformation' strategy.
This is where we partnered with an innovative start-up software company who built what we wanted in exchange for a 3 year fixed price contract to use the system - a true win/win scenario.
What do I mean by 'legacy thinking', well in simple terms I often see internal barriers created by an internalised thought process around incrementally layering things on top of legacy systems and legacy processes all in the hope it can make you more agile, reduce your cost, and possibly make you seem innovative in your customers mind.
Every company I have worked with have what's known as 'change makers', even in IT.....so my view is to enable them to work cross functionally to solve the problem, and if it can't be solved in a commercial and timely manner in-house then maybe you should ask them to to look at a few start-ups.
Sometimes working with a start-up can get you where you want to go a lot quicker, they're not constrained by your 'legacy mindset' they are not looking to take an incremental step to 'innovate' they might already have some great ideas, and in exchange for a mutually beneficial commercial relationship can get you where you want to be.
My wife and I co-founded the company and bootstrapped it for two and a half years. We both did almost everything when we started, including customer service. You get a lot of insight by doing customer service. We actually bake that into our employee onboarding process. Regardless of level or department, everybody does customer service for two weeks when they start at our company.
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