Getting Trapped in Technical Debt: Sociotechnical Analysis of a Legacy System’s Replacement
Authors: Rinta-Kahila, Tapani; Penttinen, Esko; Lyytinen, Kalle
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2023)
<jats:p>Organizations replace their legacy systems for technical, economic, and operational reasons. Replacement is a risky proposition, as high levels of technical and social inertia make these systems hard to withdraw. Failure to fully replace systems results in complex system architectures involving manifold hidden dependencies that carry technical debt. To understand how a process for replacing a complex legacy system unfolds and accumulates technical debt, we conducted an explanatory case study at a local manufacturing site that had struggled to replace its mission-critical legacy systems as part of the larger global company’s commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) system implementation. We approach the replacement as a sociotechnical change and leverage the punctuated sociotechnical information system change model in combination with the design-moves framework to analyze how the site balanced creating digital options, countering social inertia, and managing (architectural) technical debt. The findings generalize to a two-level (local/global) system-dynamics model delineating how replacing a deeply entrenched mission-critical system generates positive and negative feedback loops wit…