CIOs rarely put “manage legacy systems” on their holiday wish lists. Yet every year-end, as budgets are finalized and strategic roadmaps are reviewed, the same unwelcome guest appears in the form of decades of historical ERP data and aging infrastructure that holds it.
The ERP Inheritance Problem
Most SAP S/4HANA business cases are built on promises of clean cores, standardized processes, and rapid innovation. However, what starts as a transformation often turns into an inheritance project. Instead of designing purely for the future, IT teams find themselves heavily taxed by the past. They are forced to carry forward custom code, process variants, and massive data footprints from previous ERP generations.
This technical inheritance can drain an organization’s resources. Therefore, for CIOs, especially, every dollar spent maintaining a frozen SAP ECC environment or patching a legacy non-SAP application is a dollar they cannot spend on AI, cloud innovation, or customer experience. The project isn’t just about implementing the new; it’s about paying for the old.
The Brownfield Reality
This challenge is the result of the Brownfield, or selective data transition, often winning out over a Greenfield approach, as finance, tax, and legal departments cannot simply delete the last 15 years of business history. They need access to old invoices, audit trails, and asset lifecycles for statutory compliance.
Consequently, many organizations compromise by moving to SAP S/4HANA while keeping their legacy systems running in the background for read-only access. This creates a shadow estate of applications that offer no business value but continue to consume licenses, infrastructure, and energy.
Accept the Data, Not the System
Organizations can break this cycle when they realize they can accept the inheritance of data without taking on the burden of the system. Data Migration International’s (DMI’s) JiVS Information Management Platform (IMP) helps organizations in this endeavor by creating a clean break and decoupling historical information from the application that created it.
With JiVS, organizations can migrate 100% of their legacy structured and unstructured data into a system-independent, legally compliant retention platform. This allows them to fully decommission SAP or non-SAP source systems while ensuring auditors and business users continue to have immediate access to the information they need. The result is often a reduction in operational costs by up to 80% and a significantly leaner, faster migration to SAP S/4HANA.
Data Versus Systems
For the modern CIO, it is essential to distinguish that legacy data is not the enemy; unmanaged legacy systems are. Data is institutional memory; it is an asset.
However, a legacy system is a liability that prevents the organization from moving quickly. By using a platform like JiVS to separate the two, leaders can finally stop inheriting the past and start fully investing in the future.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Organizations must move beyond legacy systems to keep a Clean Core. While the allure of a Greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation is a fresh start, the reality for most enterprises is a complex Brownfield or hybrid scenario. However, organizations cannot ignore the past to build the future. Thus, the challenge lies in how organizations can keep legacy data, which is a legal and audit requirement, without treating the new SAP S/4HANA system as a dumping ground for historical data. Organizations that cannot meet this task effectively turn their digital transformation into an expensive inheritance exercise and risk polluting the new clean core with decades of process variants.
Maintaining legacy systems solely for data retention raises costs and inefficiencies. Keeping legacy systems running consumes infrastructure and licenses. However, more critically, it ties up scarce functional expertise. Organizations that maintain such systems solely to preserve legacy data force their IT teams to bankroll technical debt rather than fund innovation. ERP Insiders must therefore recognize that data retention does not require application retention to break this cycle.
Decouple to accelerate migration. Data Migration International presents a specific architectural approach—typified by its JiVS IMP—where data is strictly decoupled from the application layer. By moving 100% of structured and unstructured data to a system-independent layer, organizations can retire the source system entirely while maintaining legal certainty over their data. This is a migration accelerator, reducing SAP S/4HANA migration effort by 50%.
