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Beyond Migration: How Strategic Modernisation Unlocks Real Business Value
As London Tech Week 2025 explores technology in the Age of AI, many organisations are still battling the basics: up to 80% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining legacy to keep the lights on. Layer on a soaring architectural complexity, scarce digital skills and mounting technical debt, and the result is an environment that starves innovation and cyber‑defence.
At a time when boards, regulators, and customers expect agility, insight, strong cyber security posture, and sustainability, legacy complexity is more than an IT concern - it’s a material business and compliance risk.
To meet this moment, organisations must rethink their approach to modernisation. Starting with the business drivers, modernisation must become a continuous, outcome-led journey, not a one-off migration plan. One that aligns people, processes and platforms to what moves the business forward.
The Problem Isn’t Just Legacy - It’s Misalignment
Many organisations do not struggle due to a lack of ability to utilise cloud technology. Instead, they face challenges because technological change remains disconnected from business strategy.
Common symptoms of this issue include:
- Misaligned priorities and siloed investment cases that obscure return on investment on the KPIs
- Complex systems with no clear path to mitigate risks or accelerate delivery
- Ambitions for artificial intelligence (AI) that outpace the readiness of platforms and inability to deliver strategic programmes such as enterprise scale‑ agentic AI
- Persistent shortage of digital skills—both within delivery teams and at Board level - leaving executives without the insight or tools needed to drive sustained progress
Collectively, these pressures push organisations to launch major transformation programmes, yet evidence shows the vast majority still fail to deliver their promised benefits. Oxford research cited in The Economist reveals that although only about 40 % of IT projects blow their budgets, those that do, exceed costs by an average of 450 %
Breaking this pattern demands a fundamental shift: treat digitisation as a continuous, value‑driven lifecycle rather than a one‑off capital project. That mindset underpins the modernisation approach required to face today’s challenges.
Modernisation as a Lifecycle — Not a Project
Too often, modernisation is treated as a one-time initiative enabling short-term gains while quietly reintroducing complexity on a long-term basis. What’s needed instead is a repeatable, structured lifecycle - one that links technology change to business priorities, reduces risk over time, and avoids the re-accumulation of technical debt.
Many organisations treat modernisation as a standalone initiative to capture quick wins. But without sustained structure, these efforts often introduce new layers of complexity, ultimately recreating the very challenges they aimed to resolve.
The lifecycle starts with defining ambition. Leaders identify the outcomes that matter. Whether improving resilience, accelerating time-to-market, or increasing capital efficiency, set direction accordingly. Next comes discovery and quantification, where teams build a detailed understanding of the estate and its technical interdependencies, uncover hidden costs and risks, and operational exposure baseline.
With this clarity, organisations can build a value-based roadmap, sequencing initiatives that deliver measurable ROI and reduce delivery risk. They then move into a phased iterative delivery model where teams strike the balance on innovation and operational stability. Governance, FinOps controls, and agile ways of working, keep strategy and execution tightly coupled, while continuous feedback loops drive incremental value.
Measurement and optimisation are no longer the epilogue to delivery but the ignition point for the next phase in the digital lifecycle. Organisations can lean on the always-on telemetry capability to surface performance, cost, adoption, carbon footprint and Experience-Level Agreements (XLAs) in real time. Armed with this live intelligence, teams convert every release into a learning engine, trimming waste, sharpening value.
By working this way, modernisation becomes an ongoing discipline, not just a delivery milestone, but a method for evolving with business needs.
What Good Looks Like
Across high-risk, high-scale sectors, one approach to modernisation consistently delivers meaningful, measurable results: a continuous, business-led lifecycle that ties every technical decision to a strategic outcome - and doesn’t stop at go-live.
In global finance, GE Capital rehosted 3.5 million daily transactions onto an open platform, cutting mainframe operating costs by 66%. The capital saved didn’t sit idle, it fuelled customer analytics innovation, accelerating product delivery and growth.
In the central government, the Government Digital Service containerised GOV.UK, the UK’s most-visited public website making it cheaper to run, more scalable during demand surges, and significantly more resilient. All this was achieved without any visible downtime for the citizens it serves.
SP Energy Networks consolidated its priority services platform in critical national infrastructure, enabling more accurate, data-driven operations. The result was 99.93% service continuity for vulnerable customers, reaching its resilience target a year ahead of schedule.
These organisations operate in very different domains, but they share a common success pattern: modernisation treated as a disciplined, iterative journey, not a one-off event. Each started with business priorities, used measurable KPIs to steer decisions, and built the capability to sustain momentum beyond implementation.
Conclusion
For senior leaders, three questions now define the modernisation agenda:
- Is your IT budget fully aligned to business priorities or trapped in legacy run-costs?
- Which services remain exposed to regulatory or operational risk because of legacy dependencies?
- And how well does your current roadmap support cost-efficiency, AI adoption, or ESG targets?
If the answers are unclear or incomplete, it’s time to rethink the model, not the ambition. Modernisation is not about moving everything to the cloud. It’s about moving the organisation forward. That means reducing drag, building readiness, and unlocking capabilities that last. A lifecycle-based approach provides the structure, governance and momentum to do just that, ensuring transformation delivers value well beyond go-live.
If your organisation is ready to modernise with purpose and unlock real business value, UBDS Digital can help. We offer a lifecycle approach that connects legacy transformation to measurable outcomes, underpinned expert application modernisation, robust managed IT services, and proactive protection through our Managed SOC (security operations centre). Get in touch to start your modernisation journey.
Author: Arun Kumar Manoharan, UBDS Digital. Global Head of Strategy Enablement.
techUK and TechSkills at London Tech Week
techUK is proud to once again be taking part in London Tech Week. The event is a fantastic showcase for UK tech, and we’re pleased that techUK members and colleagues are represented on the agenda. You can find details on our speaking engagements and activities across the week, here.
We're also pleased to be working with eight techUK members at London Tech Week to highlight the positive impact of the tech industry in the UK.
You can find more details on the author of this blog, below:
