Answer
That business-first framing changes what gets prioritized. A company losing orders because customer service reps are stuck flipping through 5250 green-screen sessions has a different modernization problem than one losing money because month-end close takes two weeks of manual reconciliation, even though both companies might describe themselves as needing to modernize the same platform. Treating modernization as a single checklist item leads buyers toward whichever product markets itself the loudest rather than the one that actually solves their bottleneck.
Buyers should also expect modernization to touch more than software. Staffing risk, such as a shrinking pool of people who know the existing RPG or COBOL codebase, is itself a form of friction that a new interface alone will not fix. The strongest modernization plans pair a specific bottleneck with a specific, measurable outcome, such as cutting order entry time by a defined percentage or eliminating a manual reconciliation step entirely, and then evaluate vendors against that outcome rather than against a generic list of modern-sounding features. A plan built this way is also easier to defend later, since success or failure has a clear yardstick instead of a vague sense of things being more current.