As evidenced by the industry’s spaghetti of tangled legacy systems, some of them decades old, it is easier to build new than it is to retire the old. It leaves many incumbents straddling two IT worlds, which brings challenges all its own.

‘Things tend to break at the edges when you take something out and replace it, creating new vulnerabilities,’ said Chad Sands, IT Leader and Architect at State Farm. ‘When you modernize part of the system, the core functionality is fine but it’s all the things it touches.’

One way to address this is to treat the modernization as a replacement, said Sands. ‘Insulate it, test it, scale and then do data migration and existing customer migration into that solution,’ he said. ‘We’ve had some successes with that approach.’

This work needs careful governance to ensure the IT investment is aligned with business strategy. Rather than stifling innovation, the right governance and accountability guardrails deliver better and more creative outcomes. ‘We can give you wide roads and high curves to explore within but you can’t ignore enterprise policies and information security interests,’ said Sands.