The technology an institution built its operations around constrains what it can do next.
The Lock-In Accumulation
Legacy technology lock-in accumulates through a process that is individually rational and collectively irrational. Each integration of a technology into an institutional process creates a dependency. Each dependency is individually modest: the cost of changing any single integration is manageable. But the accumulation of dependencies across years of technology use produces a lock-in condition where the cost of changing the underlying technology is the sum of the cost of changing every integration simultaneously — a cost that typically exceeds any reasonable technology replacement budget by multiples.
The Strategic Management of Legacy
Managing legacy technology strategically requires treating it as a liability to be systematically reduced rather than a cost to minimise in any given year. The strangler fig approach — building new capability alongside the legacy system and progressively migrating functions from old to new rather than attempting complete replacement — reduces the replacement risk while producing a steady reduction in the legacy dependency. This approach requires institutional commitment to fund the migration over an extended period, accepting the redundancy cost of running parallel systems during the transition, which is precisely the commitment that budget-cycle pressure consistently prevents.
Legacy technology is the institutional record of prior technology choices, compounded into a structural constraint. The institution that manages it proactively pays for modernisation incrementally. The institution that defers manages its consequences at crisis cost, when the constraint becomes a failure.
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