Create it new?

Imagine you have two companies. The first is only a couple years old. It was started by a few established employees with experience and some ambitious and hard working but inexperienced new comers. The second has been around for years is firmly established and has seasoned insiders. What makes the first company a threat to the second? Size, maneuverability, and momentum might be a few advantages of the first company. Consider the second company. If you are making a list, somewhere down the way on it you might mention their legacy data. The fact that they have data going back 10 or 20 years though is that a huge advantage? You might get some great longitudinal studies out of it, but would you actually think of it as a competitive advantage -- especially when weighed against the first company? Would you compare what the systems could do or how much data had in them? Sure apples to apples you would say both matter, but consider that the better system without the data grows.

I have been thinking about system design and legacy data and the weight that is put on maintaining how things used to be. The irony is that often technology is used as leverage to change how things are. Often there is a work flow or politics that is causing inefficiency amongst employees. A new system or technology is proposed because talking to people or reorganizing has resulted only in people returning to old habits. So you use technology to being about change in people. You start there, but then you stop thinking about that and get to the task at hand. Now you are thinking about current system requirements and examining the old system. A requirement of the system will be to import the old data or interface with the old systems. Suddenly what started with "bring about change" is being tempered with "work with the old".

The challenge of working with the old is not there in the first company that we first imagined. That company is free to just bring about change. It can work faster and nimbler because it is paving a new trail and not repaving the old road. Of course things are not that simple. There is a lot of benefit to having an old system to use as a model. Most likely it had things about it that worked well and features you would not have realized are important. Some things need to grow organically and hopefully an existing system has been tweaked to do so. Also there is much benefit in having something familiar to people because in the end it doesn't matter how good your system is if they do not embrace it.

Bearing that in mind though why not have tandem systems? Why not build it new and keep the old? Migrate data from the old system to the new one after you put the new system out there and get it working. Surely you will loose some data that simply doesn't fit the new model, but that's growth. Over the years you hopefully have learned something about streamlining a process down to its essentials. Simple and elegant data is something hard to come by, but hopefully experience is leading you closer to it and not further away.

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