Two-speed IT is missing an important third step, say Worldline executives

Two-speed leaves a gap between legacy and digital

The two-speed approach to IT is a way of bringing together agile and legacy models in the same business, in an attempt to keep up with changing consumer demand and shorter product cycles.

The most common approach is partitioning: dividing systems into the fast-paced consumer-facing and the slower back-end. Ultimately, two-speed is a way to transition between legacy and digital without the risks inherent in just switching off a mainframe and saying, "We're cloud now!"

As appealing as that sounds, two-speed has been criticised for raising costs and complexity without delivering results. People using the agile systems, despite being distinctly separate, are still slowed if they have to wait for legacy IT to catch up with their initiatives, and third parties may not understand who they need to talk to.

E-payments business Worldline began with a two-speed approach, but quickly realised its flaws. CTO Ryan Bryers explained:

"It's not easy to go from the old to the new, it's a big shift, so there's that concept...of the Gap of Disappointment, where the client's disappointment grows and grows and grows; [they say] ‘I want to be able to flex my systems fast and I want to be able to change immediately,' but they have legacy systems so it's hard to do. What we recognised was that it's a bit black and white; you can't just go overnight from one to the other."

UK & Ireland COO Rob Price wrote the firm's two-speed IT paper, which was published back in 2015. The following year, he and Bryers repurposed it into the three-speed paper, which proposes the concept of an additional ‘bridging' step between legacy and digital systems.

We needed to drive a transformation iteratively, rather than in one go - Rob Price, Worldline UK&I COO

"Yes you have your legacy, and yes you've got your digital, but you also have that transformational piece in between; we call it the acceleration [speed], because you have to accelerate between the two," said Bryers. "It's no different to things like TOGAF [The Open Group Architecture Framework] - you have your current state, and where you're going, and you have your transformational project. Same concept, really."

"Most business aren't like Google," said Price; "they don't have a fully digital workforce, and there are all sorts of backgrounds and technology skill sets… There's the digital place and the legacy one. What we couldn't do was instantly transform a workforce split across multiple locations and technologies. We needed to drive a transformation iteratively, rather than in one go."

One of the ways that Worldline used its three-speed approach was in train stations' Customer Information Systems, to change the way that people work with departure boards. Price said:

"That product [live departure boards and announcements] has been established for decades, its technology stack is 15-20 years old. The desire from the people who work with the service was for getting the features faster.

"They started by adopting slightly different ways of working: not full agile, but using KANBAN for ordering the work and moving code repositories on to Github. Some of the stuff you'd see for digital speed, but it wasn't too far removed from their normal way of working that they'd be left behind. They got themselves to a point where they were soon doing weekly releases."

Bryers said, "At the end of the day it's about people and culture change. Yes, there's technology you should be aware of, but it's about people. The bridge isn't something you operate at for a couple of days - it could be a lengthy period of time."

Worldline knows that some businesses still place great value on their stable and trusted legacy systems. What Bryers and Price focus on now is identifying those products that only change a little bit as they look for places to apply the three-speed approach.

"It's not about everyone turning up on Monday and saying, ‘Hey, I'm sexy and agile.' We find it's better to do little bits and pieces first to enable the concept. For every legacy platform, you've got legacy people as well, and you've got to take them on the journey."