What Constitutes A Switch of Field Data Capture Software?

Having seen many software additions, upgrades, and switchouts over the last few decades, I have seen a trend to 'hold off' on these types of major projects in the last few years. It could be due to the upgrade fatigue, the ever increasing cost of I.T. and I.S. within an organization, cost of conversion of data, lack of staff, cost of retraining, and also the cost of re-integrating to other systems. While these are real challenges for an organization, waiting until the software is unsupported or near the end of its useful life, may also present other factors that end up costing the organization more in the end. Inability to collect that 'extra' data for analytics, having transformation or external integration tables or lists, for moving data across systems, and having a user interface that is not adaptable to the newer technology that can provide a better user experience. We tend to add layers of Crystal Reports, Power BI reports, or even Power Apps to make these older systems stay on the acceptable scale. When this customization effect gets more and more mature, it is that much more difficult to change out and indirectly increases the costs of that application (or even just the data that is being collected). People and resources that worked on these integration efforts, have moved on, leaving very few people in the organization with the knowledge of how anything works, and why it was done in the first place. We continue to pump field data to Data Lakes for even more custom reports, perhaps combined with maintenance or SCADA data, and even financial data from production accounting or true financial systems. Organizations can, and do bring in, data architects and data scientists to help out with managing the data and information. This of course, adds to the expense of I.S., initially as a project, then often gets carried forward as a G & A expense. Smaller organizations may not have the desire or resources to do this. When organizations question if an upgrade or changeout is warranted, I hope they look beyond the application itself and take the time to identify other cost efficiencies and opportunities they could be enjoying with the right software.