Why integration into old tech is not a good idea

So you ask "Why not integrate into old tech?"

As the technology today is moving a more than rapid pace, it's coming up more and more, we have this old CRM our internal IT team build that we want to integrate to, so the business wants to make changes, but then we have to ask IT, IT says no we cannot change that. We have invested way to much time and money into moving off.

Reality is its often overly customized, full of feature debit and has some of the worst UX you have ever seen, and two more things—the sales team don't even use it, and good luck if you're in marketing. 

But the people that build it do not want to change. Change is the only thing that is a reality forever, so its time to change this mindset.

Here are our ten reasons why you should look at replacing this old technology.

1. CRM owned by the IT department is very rarely a good idea. IT people are great at making data flow and data integrate, but they are not very good at understanding the customer communications (no offense to the IT guys, we wouldn't get by without ya).
2. Fair chance as it been a custom build there is very little documentation, and support is also on 2-3 people in the business. If you're lucky you have an external developer that built yet they are under a rock at the best of times.
3. Built on an ancient framework, and technology
4. Feature-rich, tech debt. So you have every single feature under the sun, and yet no one can drive it? Yep seen that one before. Perform a usage audit to see what is used on a daily basis. It makes our teams live easier, or the customer's experience better? Said no one ever. Once that feature is built in a custom environment, it will rarely be updated and reviewed, so you end up with this really old tech debt.
5. The people don't like it, the process is built for the 2000s, and the platform sucks.
6. Minimal API or data integration capabilities, so integration is very complicated and expensive. You will then also most likely have to have a data warehouse to manipulate the data to get it into a way you would like it in a new system that is much more customer-centric.
1. One other big issue is the marketing tech stack integration is now native so that team expects this information and data, trying to replicate this is going to cost millions.
7. The risk to the business, is very high, with custom code, and very few team members to support. What happens if you have a key outage, and these guys are not available?
8. "Our system does it better". Man the number of times I have seen this, and it being mostly inaccurate.
9. Training - how quickly can you onboard and train new team members
10. Business-focused not customer-focused
11. Technology-focused not customer-focused

So the outcome here is if you "must" integrate then that's fine, we even recommend it in some cases, keep that old transactional machine in place. But get all of the staff and communication function out of it ASAP and leverage a smart user-friendly system that's used by over 75K organizations around the world, that your sales team will use, and marketing team will love.

However, if its because your IT team says 'we cannot change it', there is a fair chance they are just trying to justify their roles. Instead, they should focus on getting these systems off their risk profile, adding value to the business, and finding more ways to save the business time, which adds more value to customers.