The building maintenance team of our office building has been modernizing our elevators over the last couple of months. Things have not gone well: the new elevators are slower than the old ones, the selected floors deselect at random and on occasion the elevator decides to show you every floor, just in case.
The worst part of the modernization is a computerized, female, voice which announces each floor. A new, futuristic, addition nobody needs, seemingly at the expense of core functionality. It loudly and consistently confronts all of its disgruntled users, by proclaiming phrases such as: ‘You are on the 18th floor’. Although I wanted to go to the 17th. Where I am late for a meeting.
IT Legacy modernization projects are the same: no organization will ever start a modernization project which just replaces existing functionality, and because of that, the ones that will fail, will spend all of their energy on snazzy technologies or new functionalities.
And when that system is turned on and the daily accounting cycle is a couple of digits off, the user will not care that the brand-new report with the wrong numbers has a glossy shine and accessible through the company intranet, it will probably only make it worse.
- Mik Lernout
