It was a dark and stormy Monday morning when Sarah walked into her first quarterly review as Chief Digital Officer. The fluorescent lights flickered. Thunder rattled the windows. But nothing could compare to the horror awaiting her: her PowerPoint slides.
Customer satisfaction scores were plummeting. Operating costs were rising. Competitors were eating their market share alive – one digital innovation at a time.
Welcome to every enterprise leader's worst nightmare: being haunted by legacy systems while the business world moves at digital speed.
When infrastructure creates monsters
Sarah's company had a particularly terrifying problem lurking in their IT infrastructure. Over the years, well-meaning teams had stitched together different systems – a CRM here, an automation tool there, a customer engagement platform somewhere else – all calling out for a true legacy transformation.
The result? A Frankenstein's monster of technology. Massive. Powerful. Completely out of control.
Customer onboarding took thirty days minimum, each application crawling through the system like something emerging from a crypt. Loan applications disappeared into bureaucratic black holes. Simple service requests required employees to toggle between seven different systems, their fingers moving frantically across keyboards.
"We've tried everything," muttered the VP of Operations, head shaking, voice hollow with defeat.
Each attempt at improvement only made the monster more complex. Each integration more terrifying than the last. Each new system creating another silo where valuable customer information went to die.
The ghost of projects past
Perhaps most haunting were the specters of previous transformation initiatives that had failed. The automation initiative from 2019 that automated exactly three processes before fading into obscurity. The customer experience platform from 2021 that no one knew how to use. The low-code experiment from 2022 that IT shut down in a panic.
Millions of dollars invested. Countless hours spent. And yet here they sat, still trapped in the same haunted house.
A hero arrives
Sarah wasn't scared. She'd seen this horror show before, and she knew exactly how to defeat it.
"We need to stop creating new monsters," Sarah said, pulling up her presentation. "We need a unified platform that can actually kill complexity at its root – one that handles process automation, decision-making, customer engagement, and workflow orchestration together."
She clicked to the next slide, a faint, angelic glow emanating from the screen. One word written across it: Pega.
Those Frankenstein solutions failed because they stitched together disconnected tools, each requiring its own integration, maintenance, and specialized knowledge. That approach didn't solve the complexity problem – it fed the monster.
Pega's platform unified everything under one intelligent automation system. Instead of rigid workflows that broke with every change, it provided adaptive intelligence that learned and improved. Instead of trapping data in silos, it orchestrated everything from a single brain.
The transformation that actually worked
Fast forward six months, and a bold legacy transformation made the impossible possible. Those 30-day onboarding processes? Now complete in hours. Those lost loan applications? Tracked end-to-end with predictive insights.
The monster finally died, but not in a puddle of bubbling green goo. Pega's low-code platform meant business teams could evolve processes themselves. When regulations changed, workflows adapted. When customer expectations shifted, engagement strategies evolved.
By Halloween, Sarah presented results that brought the boardroom back to life. Customer satisfaction was up. Operating costs were down. Market share stabilizing. And perhaps most importantly, the company was no longer haunted by the fear of being left behind.
Don't let your business become a ghost story
The scariest part of Sarah's story isn't the nightmare she inherited – it's how common that nightmare is. Right now, countless organizations are haunted by Frankenstein's monsters of their own creation: stitched-together systems that won't die, manual processes that drain resources, and failed transformation projects that cast long shadows.
The good news? You don't have to face these monsters alone.
Ready to transform your technology nightmare into a legacy transformation success story? Discover how Pega's unified platform can help you kill your Frankenstein systems and bring your digital transformation back to life.