84.7% of Companies Have Systems IT Admins 'Want to Avoid Touching'! Survey on Legacy System Reality

NTT DATA Business Brains, provider of the no-code cloud database 'Slopebase,' conducted a survey of 221 IT practitioners regarding the reality of legacy systems.

### Key Findings

- **84.7% of Admins Have Systems They 'Want to Avoid Touching'** When asked if there are systems they feel they 'want to avoid touching as much as possible' or 'feel depressed when a modification request arrives,' 84.7% answered 'Yes.' The psychological exhaustion is driven by spaghetti code resulting from years of patchwork modifications and an inability to predict the impact range of changes.

- **Documentation Discrepancy Affects Nearly 80%** Combined, 'Almost completely disconnected' (43.9%) and 'No documentation exists' (5.6%) represent nearly half of the respondents in a critical state. Including 'Partially inconsistent' (29.1%), nearly 80% of companies find their design documents untrustworthy, forcing staff into 'reverse engineering' by deciphering source code line by line.

- **Over 70% Risk System Stoppage Due to Veteran Retirement** Regarding the impact if a specific veteran admin retired suddenly, 59.8% feared 'some subsystems or tools would stop functioning,' and 15.6% reported a severe risk where 'multiple critical systems, including core systems, could stop.' Over 70% of operations rely precariously on specific individuals.

Legacy systems, often built with old languages or unique frameworks, are difficult to hand over to younger staff. Resolving this dependency and system opacity is urgent for promoting Digital Transformation (DX).