Legacy systems becoming intolerable burden

There’s a ‘pensions crisis’ looming in IT as a result of the cost of maintaining ageing legacy applications, coupled with the volume of system modernisation or retirement required in the next few years. Recent research shows an IT community worried about the scale of its commitment to proliferating systems when resources and skills are limited, yet businesses expect agility. Those are the conclusions of the Application Intelligence Survey 2004, conducted among 100 IT directors from £100m turnover companies in the UK (25 in the manufacturing sector) by applications portfolio tools company HAL Knowledge Solutions. Says Mark Kusionowicz, VP marketing at HAL: “Companies are exposing themselves to significant risk by not accounting properly for legacy applications activity. And their long-winded, ad hoc approaches to applications auditing is creating an unnecessary resource burden.” The former is a moot point; the latter less so. But it’s certainly true that there are issues to deal with here. According to the study, more than 50% of mission critical legacy systems, which run 70% of key applications, are due for serious work by 2008 – so that is quite an IT challenge. It’s also the case that maintaining and supporting older systems is stealing resource, and will need attention. In a little detail, 65% of manufacturers (slightly below the mean) say they will have to retire an average of 37% of their existing infrastructure by 2008. And an additional 28% is scheduled for modernisation. The drivers: 78% of companies see alignment of their IT to the business objectives as the priority for 2005, and 63%, compliance with regulatory environments – both irresistible pressures. “So over half of the applications inventory are going to have to be majorly changed in some way for business reasons,” says Kusionowicz. “In such an environment of change, the areas if pain will be around resources and capability in already hard-pressed IT departments.” He also points to the survey’s finding that, in manufacturing, an average 36% of IT resources are currently dedicated to maintaining and supporting legacy applications – meaning they’re already pretty tied up. And it’s worth noting that HAL isn’t referring only to legacy systems as old; the survey concerned itself only with bespoke systems, including those that still surround many ERP packaged implementations. Kusionowicz believes companies aren’t helping themselves. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs around such legacy systems, he urges companies to reconsider the typical once a year or ad hoc arrangements for application inventory and operations checking – urging more regular analysis and documentation so that IT departments are better prepared. “Companies need an updated enterprise view of their systems portfolio, including the source code and its relationships to the business – how the code interacts with the business rules,” he says. “IT departments started that with Y2k, but for most, it hasn’t been maintained – and that needs to change if they’re to deliver what the business asks of them… Some of our clients are shocked when they find so much they didn’t know they had on their systems – even down to the size of their applications. And we often find 10—20% orphan code, with all the associated cost of maintaining it when it’s not doing anything.” His recommendation: “Put in place a mechanism that provides updated enterprise views, with a tool to maintain that analysis so you can understand your inventory. And use metrics like size, complexity, maintainability, required skill sets and documentation, so you can make informed decisions quickly when the business need does arise.”