Survival tomorrow means preparation today. Focusing on optimizing the cost/income ratio is not in the investor’s best interest—CEOs need to continuously invest in the end-of-life business systems. Long-term, serious investors should be challenging your business on any possible under-investment in your business IT systems.

Does your company still have a maintenance evening or weekend? Are your systems inaccessible to your customers for a whole weekend? Amazon and Google don’t shut down for the weekend, and your business shouldn’t either. If it does, then you probably still have a bit of homework to do.

The pressure to replace your legacy systems will increase with time. Have the people who originally built the system and those who made the business decisions already retired? The longer you wait to replace an inflexible system, the bigger and more cumbersome it will get—and the more expensive it will be to replace.

Did your system do fine running nightly processing jobs just a few years ago, but now needs to be near real-time? You’ll need to explain to your investors why your cost/income ratio will take a bit of a knock in order to achieve a better setup for the future.

Aim for a zero-legacy system landscape for your business-critical systems. When adopting this policy, the first step is to create an overview of your most critical systems, each labelled to indicate how much (technical) debt that system has. IMHO a company’s annual report should include such information, as today a company can lose market share incredibly fast, if their business systems are out-of-date.

Caution: Don’t make the mistake of replacing the technology from the 70s with technology from the 90s as I’ve seen done several times.