Does this sound familiar: “Most in IT are charged with making old systems work for yet another budget period at production levels on par with the new systems they aren’t allowed to buy”?
In the Information Week article below, Pam eloquently nails the path forward for modernizing legacy through the lens of the inconvenient truth “new doesn’t always mean improved”.
We have all been party to large rebuilds that didn’t really improve much but they had to be done, probably for reasons like: siloed data; can’t change the existing system; no longer supportable; or not scalable, to name a few.
A wise woman once said, “what you call legacy is actually your production environment”. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, the problem is we give up too easily and let things go too far without the minimum effort required to keep the platform sustainable.
Let’s face it, building new systems seems much more interesting than working with old, while getting budget to maintain systems BEFORE they fall apart is just no fun at all.
With longer-term thinking and consistent minimum effort these issues could often have been fixed along the way, but if that effort wasn’t invested then eventually the whole thing needs to get ripped out, with mixed results at best.
You might even find, if you have left modernization too late and underinvested, by just breaking out your siloed data and making it actionable plus making the black boxes stable and secure you can continue indefinitely, with minimum investment.
So what? —Systems are going to live for longer and longer. We need to get used to that idea and realize that a dollar spent now will save 10 in the future and look after them better throughout their lives.
Link to the original article here.