The Federal Government has a lot of legacy systems and spends a lot of money on them. In fact, according to a white paper on legacy system modernization from The American Council for Technology (ACT) and Industry Advisory Council (IAC), the Federal Government plans to spend $37 billion on “legacy” IT in 2017.

Lots of organizations struggle with legacy systems. Or more to the point, they struggle to maintain and make changes to them in a way that provides the pace and value the organization wants. So given the scale of this issue in the Federal Government, ACT-IAC took a crack at providing a “best practice” approach for modernizing legacy systems in the white paper I just referenced.

I read the paper a couple of times. I definitely had some strong thoughts and feels as I read it. I couldn’t keep them bottled up so I suggested some changes to how the Government should think about legacy systems modernization on Excella’s blog. I could’ve written a lot more (like on the role of DevOps, which shouldn’t be in the “DevOps/Sustainment” phase — see page 20 in the white paper), but the post was already getting lengthy. Let’s consider this a good start for discussion and iterate from there.