Last week, we released The Hidden Costs of Legacy Systems - Part 1, and took a clear look at the budget strain, the customer friction, and the growing pressure they put on today’s workforce.
(If you haven't downloaded your copy, go ahead and do that right now. Don't worry, we'll wait for you to get back.)
If you read the eBook and those realities felt familiar, you're not alone. Most organizations live with these challenges every day, often without fully realizing where they originate.
In this second half of our guide, we shift from the visible symptoms to the structural risks beneath them, and begin outlining what it really takes to reduce their long-term impact with purpose and control.
The complete Part 2 will be released in late December. But since it's the season of giving, here's an expanded peek at what you can expect.
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Hidden Cost 6: Maintenance, Patching & Support Labor
While legacy systems may seem cost-effective at a glance, they often require a disproportionate share of ongoing attention just to keep basic operations running. These maintenance burdens take time, talent, and budget away from innovation.
Instead of driving improvements, teams are stuck patching issues, troubleshooting breakdowns, and babysitting fragile integrations that weren’t built to last.
Legacy systems don’t age gracefully. The older the infrastructure, the more complexity and manual upkeep it takes to hold things together.
- Custom integration and workaround maintenance become a full-time job. Every time a system update breaks an integration or a new tool has to interface with legacy architecture, IT is constantly repairing connections or inventing makeshift solutions.
- Routine tasks like patching, bug fixing, and manual integration upkeep consume time that could otherwise be spent on innovation or strategic work.
- Hardware and software upgrades often require specialized planning or manual intervention, especially when outdated systems are no longer vendor-supported and can’t accept modern updates without breaking dependent processes.
Staffing and Resource Strain
Supporting legacy systems pulls skilled talent away from strategic work and makes it harder to hire, retain, or justify the roles needed to keep them running.
- IT teams are stretched thin, spending more time on routine support than modernization.
- Hiring or retaining staff with legacy expertise is increasingly expensive, especially for outdated languages, architectures, or tools. Many of these specialists are retiring and hard to replace, or demand premium compensation.
- Modern IT professionals may avoid legacy-heavy roles, limiting their talent pool and increasing reliance on a shrinking number of high-cost contractors.
Technical Debt & Long-Term Complexity
Every workaround and patch compounds underlying complexity, until even small changes become risky and costly to execute.
- Dead code, fragile integrations, and manual workarounds make systems harder to change without introducing new bugs. Even small updates become risky and time-consuming.
- Poor or outdated documentation slows down onboarding, complicates issue diagnosis, and makes migrations incredibly difficult.
Compounding complexity keeps organizations in reactive support cycles, where change is deferred indefinitely because people are afraid to break what’s barely working.
Solution: How to Shrink Overhead
Legacy maintenance is expensive, unpredictable, and increasingly unsustainable. Teams waste hours chasing down bugs, managing one-off fixes, and navigating undocumented systems that only a few people truly understand. These are structural problems that drain resources every day.
Reducing the labor burden of this maintenance starts with better visibility, targeted automation, and a plan to reduce complexity over time. ServiceNow provides a platform-wide foundation to simplify support, reduce staff overload, and achieve strategic IT operations.
ServiceNow helps organizations move beyond reactive fixes by automating workflows, mapping system dependencies, and replacing custom code with scalable solutions:
- Automate repetitive IT tasks. IT Service Management (ITSM) standardizes incident, change, and problem management to reduce manual work and improve resolution speed.
- Proactively manage system health. IT Operations Management (ITOM) uses Event Management and AIOps to detect issues early, minimize outages, and automate patching tasks.
- Map what matters. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) centralizes knowledge about systems and their dependencies, helping simplify planning and eliminate dead code.
- Replace fragile scripts with sustainable workflows. Low-code tools like App Engine let IT and business users build maintainable, scalable solutions without overloading development teams.
- Connect without upkeep. IntegrationHub reduces the need for custom connectors with reusable, no-code integration logic that links legacy and modern systems.
- Identify software that’s slowing you down. Software Asset Management (SAM) helps flag outdated or unsupported software that drives patching risk and unnecessary labor.
- Target high-effort systems. Application Portfolio Management (APM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) make it easier to see which platforms absorb the most effort and prioritize them for retirement or replacement.
Strategic Actions to Reduce Maintenance Overhead Over Time
To truly ease the maintenance burden, organizations need more than just tech. They need a strategy for how to use and sustain it:
- Break the cycle of reactive support. Phasing out high-labor systems requires more than timing. It takes a roadmap grounded in risk, effort, and long-term impact.
- Watch where your knowledge bottlenecks are forming. As legacy experts retire or leave, you don’t just lose skills, you lose reliability. Understanding where you’re most exposed helps focus both hiring and training efforts.
- Prioritize simplification, not just fixes. From technical debt to duplicate workflows, complexity builds quietly. Streamlining takes a clear framework for what to keep, retire, or rethink.
- Capture what isn’t written down. When institutional knowledge lives in people’s heads, continuity suffers. A centralized documentation strategy helps, but deciding what’s critical (and how to preserve it) is its own challenge.
- Let cost clarity guide the conversation. TCO analysis can make the case for change, but only if it includes the right variables, the hidden labor costs, and the real opportunity cost of inaction.
- Start where momentum is possible. Small pilots in high-friction areas can pave the way, but choosing the right starting point (and scaling it thoughtfully) makes all the difference.
- Create the structure transformation needs. Cross-functional alignment rarely happens on its own. Sustained progress often depends on shared goals, clear ownership, and a model that keeps teams pulling in the same direction.
Cutting maintenance effort opens the door to real progress. With the right platform (ServiceNow!) and the right plan, you can reduce the burden and build for what’s next.
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And this is only one of the sections in Part 2. In the full version, we unpack the broader web of structural risk created by outdated systems. More importantly, we outline what a practical, achievable modernization path actually looks like when it is driven by outcomes, not disruption for disruption’s sake.
If Part 1 revealed the visible costs of standing still, the followup shows what is happening beneath the surface and how organizations can begin shifting from reactive survival to intentional progress.
We look forward to sharing the full guide with you when Part 2 releases this Christmas.