From legacy to coreless IT: How to get started
We know this will take work, and it feels like a big and risky project. So, we have developed a blueprint - Capgemini Product Domain Modeler, to help you strategically decouple the IT infrastructure while keeping all the essential connections and then put it back together in a much more agile way. It’s a gradual plan that might take several years, but it allows incremental progress with ever more value at each stage with little risk. Below, we outline how to approach such a transition:
1 Start with a new product
The first move should always be something that does not disrupt exiting systems, but delivers value. It should be driven by a need to reinvent a product or business function. An example might be a company that makes a useful physical product, like pallets. It wants to build a smart warehouse to reduce costs and damages. This is a great project to do away from the core – adding sensors into the warehouse, then setting up an independent system in the cloud, connecting up the sensors, and building software and analytics to optimize warehouse practices. This can all exist in its own space, and be integrated with the enterprise IT system via APIs, rather than being built on top of the existing IT stack.
2 Build a portfolio of decoupled productsBuilding on the success of the first product, look for related products to develop, learning lessons and building case studies as you go. Build confidence and get business buy-in. But for now the core stays.
3 Start to replicate internal services externallyUsing Product Domain Modeler, start integrating the new products into the existing IT systems and learning what the barriers are — both technical and cultural — to success. Use these to continually refine the process to limit risk. Design top-level frameworks that allow all the different parts to share data and talk to each other in the same language, via APIs.
4 Unbundle the companyLeveraging Product Domain Modeler, and the lessons learned, gradually — over several years — unbundle the rest of the company, piece by piece, replicating all relevant business units or product lines with their own IT setup until there is no longer a single core. Where systems are being replicated, we can build a parallel architecture in the cloud, test it, and then flip a switch over to the new architecture without anyone noticing.
The IT fundamentals that serve the business – i.e., the code – stay the same. And there can still be plenty of systems and services shared by multiple units. This is not an unrecognizable transformation. But each part ends up more autonomous and with far fewer dependencies. Future changes and innovations are therefore contained to one unit – making them quick and low-risk to launch.
The approach outlined in this paper is long-term. It requiresbuilding new product lines outside the business's wall and reengineering existing parts. That could be a long and complex process. But thanks to recent innovations in Generative AI, we can reduce much of the heavy lifting.
Where we have a clear goal – i.e., a defined business domain and set of services – AI can write most of the standardized code, which humans can check over, rather than having to write it all from scratch. That can reduce many weeks of work to just days, making this transition much faster and more cost-efficient than it would have been even a year ago.
