So I'm having coffee with a CTO yesterday — not my coffee, naturally, his expense account — and he tells me they've just had this *epiphany*. They discovered that their legacy module from 2009, the one gathering digital dust next to seventeen abandoned Sharepoint instances, can actually be « reconfigured » to handle « real-time supply chain visibility ». His words, not mine. Though technically, also mine now, because I spent the next hour nodding while internally calculating the billing hours.

Here's where it gets beautiful: this feature has been sitting there since the Clinton administration. It's not new. It's not even slightly new. It's the equivalent of finding a washing machine in your basement and calling it a startup innovation. But the man is *convinced* he's cracked the code. « Nobody uses it », he says. « It's untapped potential. » I wanted to tell him that untapped potential is just another word for « feature that didn't solve anything the first time », but instead I said, « This is a paradigm-shifting leverage point for your operational ecosystem maturity. »

Twenty years, 1,800 rollouts, and I've learned the golden rule: a decade-old capability repackaged as discovery is worth *exactly* three times what it actually costs to implement. He leaves thinking he's Elon Musk. I leave with a signed SOW for « Strategic Module Activation and Change Acceleration ». Everyone wins. The system loses. The spreadsheets in the corner keep running their shadow operations uninterrupted. But that's not my problem to bill for — yet.