Legacy? What legacy?
It’s two days now since our world wide Virtual Luminaries event took place. Very interesting and if you want to find out more (and to get a feel for what May Madness will look like this year…) go here: http://vshow.on24.com/vshow/ca3?l=en_UK#, all sessions can be viewed all materials can be downloaded for a few more weeks…
One of the discussions was about, “Harnessing the waves of change in IT”, and I was one of the presenters. I made a point that it is important for CIO’s to make sure their existing environment is well managed and agile enough to make it easy to adopt new technologies… During the Q&A after the session I was contacted by one of the attendees about this and we chatted about legacy applications (remember this…) and what you should/can do to make the agile and more “open”. After about 10 minutes of chatting I started to get suspicious and I asked her what type of applications she was talking about… I somehow automatically assumed that we were talking about Mainframe applications…
But, it was about Windows and Unix applications… In the days after the event, I called some friends and they all confirmed that “legacy” Windows and Unix applications are considered to be a more serious threat or risk than mainframe applications. And I now know why this is the case as well… Most of them told me that their mainframe applications are almost always well documented, maintained and reliable. AND that it’s not so hard to write a few WebServices to access the data and business logic if needed. The “other” legacy applications need to be re-written because they are almost impossible to integrate with any new technology, are not documented (or just poorly), are not as stable as one would expect and are simply costing too much money to maintain.
So, add this argument to the bag of arguments you have been collecting for the past years. It is another reason why investing in your mainframe is a good idea but also proof that every new technology will once be considered “legacy”. So, if documentation, stability, serviceability and reliability are already a problem today, imagine what they will be in the near future. Find some proof points internally and use them to your advantage…
Share this post: