The problem is that the modernization projects all sought to “add functionality”—more layers of paint—or just to move to more modern infrastructure, particularly to the cloud. None of them targeted serving clients better or scaling to meet demand. If the people running the systems had set scale as a goal and truly analyzed their bottlenecks, they would have recognized the need to rationalize and simplify the accumulated layers of policy and process along with bringing in new technology. To be fair, none of them felt they had permission to.
