Migration of legacy systems - the Swedish Rescue Services incident reporting system

The Swedish Rescue Services are migrating from an incident report system to a fully-fledged incident learning system. The migration process has been studied under the lenses of organizational learning theories, to identify challenges that can offer advice for future system migration projects. The objectives expressed by the central agency leading the studied migration process aimed at implementing organizational double-loop learning by using the incident reports as enablers to learn from the rescue operation and improve future operations accordingly. In practice this objective has been lost along the way, with the agency focusing more on cosmetic changes, such as terminology, attributes and labels. Meanwhile end-users expressed different and concrete needs, requiring new functionality, process improvements and organizational development. The study highlights the importance of early, active user involvement in the migration process for dual use legacy systems, to avoid losing explicitly articulated high-level objectives, such as improved performance and dual use of the system.