THE GRAYING OF IT: WHAT CAN YOUR ORGANIZATION DO?

by Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council

For decades, various IT gurus have predicted the demise of the mainframe and the need to rewrite (or replatform) core applications. Years later, many, if not most, of these applications continue to perform their required function 24/7/365. This lulled many organizations into the position that it was simply impossible to rewrite many mission-critical applications and that the best one could do was make minor changes around the edges of these applications. Moreover, many of those who know the most about these applications are approaching retirement, so they are reluctant to take on the task of rewriting code and prefer simply to continue applying life support.

But even the most backward IT organization recognizes that all systems eventually must be redesigned and replaced. It is just that software systems don't wear out, so organizations often don't understand where they are until it's too late. In the world of the aging workforce, many highly knowledgeable employees use their knowledge as the ultimate form of job security, which is no small thing in this world of uncertainty.

Here are some of my recommendations:

• Develop an overall enterprise architecture. The enterprise architecture is a basic set of plans and metadata that describes all the critical business processes, applications, databases, and technologies that an organization has (or will) employ. Legacy migration must be considered just a part of this general framework. Start immediately.

• As part of the enterprise architecture, develop an inventory of all your applications. Don't get caught in the trap of defining things as legacy versus nonlegacy. Everything that is running is legacy!

• Identify all the critical applications and their vulnerabilities. The average large organization's IT inventory often has thousands of applications, but typically a much smaller percentage -- roughly 20% -- are truly critical to the business. Organizations must be clear about exactly which systems are critical and their real status. IT management should be responsible for conducting (or having another organization conduct) an application "health check."

• Develop a long-term migration (or replacement) plan for every major application. An application without a migration plan has no future!

• Identify those who maintain these systems and their background. Don't get trapped into defining people simply based on core competencies that you feel compelled to preserve. People are multidimensional; learn as much as you can about what these individuals really know. One person may hold the keys to many important applications.

• Identify others in the organization who know about these systems, especially those who took part in designing and/or developing them. The documentation of old systems is never complete. Find all those with valuable knowledge while they are still around and collect their knowledge in a form that can serve as the basis for others to learn about applications. Give those with valuable knowledge an incentive to share it.

• For those applications where the workers involved are scheduled to retire before the planned migration or upgrade, identify the knowledge transfer plan to provide interim support. If you can't migrate a critical system in the forecasted period of exposure, you must assign others and begin to make them knowledgeable. Try to get a team to do this. It is very difficult to get a young person to learn an obsolete technology without a great deal of support and the prospect of long-term gain.

-- Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council