I just read this very interesting article from MIT Sloan: How Leading Organizations Are Getting The Most Value from IT. 

My immediate takeaways align with our strategy (warning for confirmation bias) to provide a business low-code platform to let our customers transform their businesses with maximum ability to handle the "unknown, unknowns."

Instead of letting your legacy systems become a hinder to your digital transformation, you can liberate the power in them and innovate in a flexible layer on top.  In their article, MIT Sloan has analyzed the technology decisions of more than 8,300 companies around the globe. Leaders grow revenues 50% faster than the average 20% of the companies they studied and as much as double the bottom 25%. My takeaways

• It's no longer tenable to let departments or business units make individual decisions about technology. "It appears defensible, but this results in highly customized systems that deploy in isolated pockets of the organization."
• Doubling down on industry-specific tech locks companies in, "inhibiting their ability to pivot or combine technologies in the future."
• Leaders reimagine multiple business processes so that they can scale the same innovative technology across all of them.

There is a paradox in the above. I genuinely believe in the need for departments, business units, or market areas to use technologies that create the highest possible relevance for reaching their own goals. However, a fresh approach to deal with the paradox, and reap the benefits of both worlds (fragmentation <-> consolidation), could be to apply the platform play concept, very well described in a great piece of research by McKinsey The platform play: How to operate like a tech company. McKinsey means that a modular, platform-based IT setup enables companies to accelerate and innovate up to 100 times faster.

 The Competitive layerAt Flowfactory, we call this creating a "Competitive Layer" - something I have elaborated around in earlier blog posts, e.g., How a low-code competitive layer reduces APM costs and Low-Code: Your Agile Legacy System. 

By introducing an agile low-code layer on top of legacy, companies can gain a fantastic speed and dramatically reduce APM costs. 

So instead of letting your legacy systems become a hinder to your digital transformation, you can liberate the power in them and innovate in a flexible layer on top. What type of CEO are you? Are you one that is ready to open the lid to your IT department, and get involved in some directional decisions?