1. The Comfortable Misdiagnosis  Legacy modernization is usually framed as a technical problem: old code, obsolete platforms, rising maintenance costs, and limited agility. That framing is understandable, but it is also incomplete.  Systems that continue to run core operations after ten, fifteen, or thirty years are not merely outdated technology. They are repositories of business memory, shaped by decisions and trade-offs made under real pressure.  Treating them purely as "t

If legacy systems are "Business Memory," the primary task of a modernization team is extraction. You cannot find this memory in a modern requirements document; you must excavate it from the layers of the existing operation.