Legacy Revaluation and the Making of LegacyWorks

by André LeClerc and Arun K. Majumdar

Caught in the frenetic rise of the dot-com phenomenon and following hot on the heels of Y2K, IT departments find themselves drowning in a sea of spaghetti logic and a Gordian knot of networked applications and legacy systems. As if that were not enough, the stock market deflation and the loss of business due to the tragic events of 9/11 have further shrunk much-needed IT budgets. Over the past year, the IT balloon has burst (actually, it has been more like a live grenade, with shrapnel hitting most IT shops worldwide). IT needs to get back to business basics by optimizing business process management and using and leveraging corporate knowledge assets, legacy assets, and core business workflow. The survival tactics of the new millennium are to optimize, reuse, revalue, and "do more with less." To paraphrase an old saying, those who fail to optimize are optimizing to fail.