It is said that, on average, 31% of an organization’s technology is made up of legacy systems. Maintaining those systems can be a costly burden, with an average of 60-80% of IT budgets allocated to keeping them running.
This can lead to a myriad of surface costs for companies which include:
- Tech debt
- Ongoing maintenance and support costs
- License fees
- Employee Burnout
- Stale data
- Outdated security methods
- Frequent downtime
If you are an employee that has to work with these outdated systems, an IT professional who has to support them or a CFO that is signing off on the expenditures related to the continued use of these legacy applications, the costs are apparent.
Often an organization has made the choice to move off an older system to something more efficient or one that can better serve the present day needs of the business. This is often the case in Healthcare where the decision has been made to move off one EMR onto another but still has the legacy system in place because ALL the data and files couldn’t be moved over with classic ETL tools. Other than manual keying and clicking of each discreet piece of data there really isn’t a way to do this without significant programming.
Enter in RPA to save the day.
As I have said in the past, RPA, specifically with UiPath, is the greatest integration platform in the world. It can use the front end, back end, and plugin activities to get the job done. Since RPA by its nature is platform agnostic it doesn’t really care what systems it is moving data from. In fact, in some cases RPA works best with older systems and equally well with today’s modern cloud applications. We recently stood up an automation that will move 12 million files and over 100K encounter records from CPSI to Epic.
While the problem is there, few think of RPA as an answer. An overt focus on API’s and back-end data transfer tools are a go-to. The reality of the matter is that costs are sufficient to get some bots to do the work to prove out the ROI.
If you’re interested in learning more about our solution, we’d be happy to talk with you about it – no strings attached. Reach out; let’s talk!
Written by Peter Camp, CTO & Founder
