TRAPPED BY STRANDED INVESTMENTS

by Don Estes, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

There is a great deal of advice available on strategies for implementing new technology and for new methodologies for project management, but effective advice is relatively rare for those many sites with stranded investments in legacy IT systems and their respective support organizations. We see some or all of the following issues again and again in organizations caught in a stranded investment cost trap:

• Aging software and hardware with excessive maintenance costs

• Being locked into high-cost mainframe technologies without the business justification for mainframes, which starves other areas of needed investment

• Change management, particularly the human factors in introducing process changes

• Dislocated islands of infrastructure that could benefit from consolidation

• Retraining programmers into new technologies and with new infrastructure and tools to increase their effectiveness and productivity

• Integrating automated workflow (BPM) technologies with back-office applications

We frequently recommend some or all of the following tactics to address these challenges:

• A relentless focus on productivity, initially inside but also outside of IT

• • Interactive development environments for programmers who don't have them

  • Automated workflow providing non-IT productivity improvements on the order of 50%, typically for back-office applications

  • Introduction of relational databases and object-oriented programming for new programs and new applications

  • Training for technical staff in new, more efficient programming and project management (especially agile) methodologies

• Selective standardization and modernization of legacy assets through low-cost bulk program modification technology, with particular emphasis on:

• • Introduction of a service-oriented architecture to link islands of infrastructure

  • The introduction of a relational database to replace nonrelational data stores

  • Introduction of XML document exchange for low-cost application integration

  • Replacement of obscure languages with Java, C, or COBOL

  • Restructuring of overmaintained programs to reduce maintenance cost

• Replatforming of mainframe applications to Intel (Linux or Windows), mainframe Linux, or Unix platform

  • Replace mainframe hardware with Intel-based servers to take advantage of the hundredfold difference in cost per unit of computing for applications that do not require the stability of mainframe computing

  • Mainframe Linux (zLinux) as an alternative target platform can be a useful transitional strategy

  • Standardized mainframe applications (COBOL, CICS/batch, VSAM/DB2) can be ported easily to Unix, Linux (including zLinux), or Windows; existing staff can usually do this inexpensively with a bit of training and support

The primary challenge facing all organizations with a substantial portfolio of legacy assets is how to do more with less. IT needs to improve its own productivity, but IT is also uniquely capable of improving the productivity of the rest of the organization as well as its own. As a result, IT must look outside as well as inside for opportunities to introduce productivity improving innovations in both technology and process.

-- Don Estes, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium