A statewide program proposes replacing every departmental data system in one cutover weekend. What modernization approach is more sustainable?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Rebuilding the whole bridge overnight while traffic is still rolling is a brave story and a bad plan. Peel the old away piece by piece—strangler or incremental modernization—so citizens keep getting service while architecture improves.
Full Explanation
Replacing every departmental data system in one cutover weekend is rarely sustainable for a statewide or municipal program. Prefer incremental or strangler-style modernization that migrates capability by capability with lower cutover risk and room to learn. Requiring big-bang rewrite because “incremental change cannot improve architecture” is false and high risk. Halting all integrations until a single greenfield platform finishes freezes the enterprise. Outsourcing the weekend cutover while skipping coexistence planning transfers risk without removing it. Exam preference: incremental modernization with coexistence. Caveat: incremental still needs a target architecture so each slice moves toward a coherent estate rather than adding permanent dual running without end. Operationally, pick one capability slice, define coexistence interfaces, migrate with rollback criteria, and only then schedule the next slice based on measured outcomes. Fund each modernization slice with explicit coexistence interfaces and rollback criteria before scheduling the next departmental cutover. Measure residual dual-running cost after each slice; strangler progress should reduce coexistence burden over time, not normalize permanent parallel estates.