How do you build a compelling business case for phasing out legacy tech?
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It should build itself, actually. Costs to maintain, from both a physical and human capital perspective, should be able to justify migration or transformation to a solution that is more sustainable and cost effective today.
Great points but there is also a trap to avoid.
Can you use the legacy tech another day? Can you use it for another week? What about another month? And how about another year?
It is a similar problem as the frog in the boiling pot of water. The danger is the slow slide of decline over time versus stark failure. Put that in perspective with priorities in any given year and legacy tech often falls below the water line.
If you have clear cost advantages or features with value in business terms, that is great. Unfortunately, most legacy tech does not have that opportunity. Therefore the business case is much harder and complicated to navigate. Identifying risks, value and cost avoidance can help. Engaging a cross-functional team to understand and buy-in the problem is key.
Most everything has been covered here already, I would just emphasize the area that I think is most important and it relates to agility and resource management/solution delivery:
Think of legacy infrastructure and applications like pulling money out of a 401K account. You pull out 1000 and pay it back over 2 years. You paid back the 1000, that's great, but what did you lose, you lost the interest created and the compounding of that interest over the remaining lifetime of your 401K account. This is money you'll never earn.
Having critical resources allocated to something that's just "keeping the lights on" vs. some or all of those people being focused on activities (coding, learning, sharing, building, etc., etc) that further the mission and vision of the enterprise is a lost opportunity that you'll never reap the rewards from.
I have used business agility to new opportunities as one of the key tenets for phasing out legacy tech using data to demonstrate the time taken to make changes to legacy due to various limitations with unsupported systems, lack of skills to make changes, undocumented code, and impact to business due to the delay in providing new functionality or fixing old issues.
Cost saving is an add-on benefit in some cases.
Use the Equifax breach as an example.
Old technology that should have been retired, and was scheduled to be retired, was hacked before it was retired.
A project that would have cost perhaps $500,000; ended up exceeding $100 million in fines, legal fees, bad PR, and more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/09/14/equifax-hack-the-result-of-patched-vulnerability