Upgrading strategies for legacy systems and factors influencing the choice of strategy - A case study at Scania IT

Information systems are today an important contributing part of a company’s competitiveness. It is what links IT with the business, and aims to support business processes and needs, in order to create overall efficiency. Today there are various information systems at the market and companies can acquire information systems almost tailored to their business. However, this has not always been the case. During the 1990’s there only existed a limited amount of standardized systems and many companies therefore developed their own information systems. These in-house developed systems, often called legacy systems, have been further developed over the years, as the companies and their businesses have advanced. Thus many companies are now locked-in with large, complex and tightly integrated legacy systems, which are hard to replace and to move away from. The purpose of this report is twofold. Firstly to investigate the processes of making an upgrading strategy selection, that is, to give guidelines on how a company shall move away from a complex legacy system. This is based on an extensive theoretical study on the subject as well as seven semi-structured interviews with people with experience or knowledge on the subject. The second purpose of this report is to analyze what implications different upgrading strategies would have if they were implemented at Scania. Therefore a case study of the company, where 15 semi-structured interviews were held constitutes the ground for a situation analysis, which is compared to the result of the theoretical study. The process of upgrading an information system can roughly be divided into four steps: Situation Analysis, Investigations on upgrading strategies, Evaluation and Analysis, and Selection. The first two steps are in focus in this report in order to give guidance on how to initiate an upgrading project. Main findings are that the choice of upgrading strategy is mainly dependent on the company’s characteristics and standpoint on the factors; organizational structure, future strategy, the processes that needs support and stakeholders. These factors in turn take different shapes depending on the upgrading strategy; Migration to another platform, developing a new system, Modular solution and Single Vendor system. An evaluation and analysis on the implications of the different upgrading strategies for Scania is also presented