HMG has over £38 billion of digital transformation programmes underway yet over £400 billion of the Government’s operating revenues are reliant on legacy IT.
And while your organisation needs to be agile, your legacy infrastructure is the polar opposite and doesn’t readily support this transformation.
Since 2014, our team has transformed legacy technology platforms for several large central government departments.
We initially tried to migrate legacy infrastructure to the cloud in a like-for-like way but soon discovered that a “lift and shift” without any transformation just moved the problem elsewhere and didn’t realise the benefits we were seeking.
Technology transformation is only truly successful when not constrained by legacy architecture – you need the freedom to consider any solution, service or product – and when you start thinking in a completely different way, the solution becomes transformational and the benefits far greater.
Embracing public cloud and the internet, we stripped down what all the infrastructure actually did and discovered the challenge we were trying to solve wasn’t particularly complex (see diagram at right).
We care that “our thing” (laptop, smartphone, tablet) can connect to “our stuff” (our data, digital services and applications) and we want to manage which bits of our stuff “our user” can access. That’s it.
But while the value is clearly with our stuff and our user, multiple layers of infrastructure and hardware have historically been placed between those points, providing a convoluted and annoying user experience.
The average government transaction crosses 35 technology systems!
