In cases like that, he adds, you hold onto it.Įven when you have a business case for replacement, you may be at a disadvantage in terms of disentangling your systems from a technology if you didn’t plan for the technology’s eventual replacement up front, Gunkel says. “It’s very cost ineffective to rebuild that, and you run the risk of causing some change that shifts the model or trust in the model,” he says. For example, researchers built industry-leading climate models in Fortran. But Gunkel says other legacy systems aren’t worth the risks to update. “They were able to eliminate a middleware piece that was adding complexity,” he says.Īny opportunity to pay down debt, repurpose, and make strategic investment decisions that give the highest yields should be looked into, says Ivy-Rosser.
#Simply fortran window closes code
But after carefully reviewing the code and streamlining the application, they ended up doing it in a week. For example, the team initially estimated they would need a month to rewrite an application. Part of the code review process was getting developers to think differently about how they worked in the old paradigm at UC Riverside and how they might work differently in the new one. “We see a lot of that with our banking, insurance, and actuary clients.” If migration isn’t feasible, another option is to work with a service provider that can provide a large pool of legacy talent. The scarcity of talent that can support business-critical legacy systems can block growth, and is a good reason to consider retiring aging technology, says Ivy-Rosser. Today, as part of the migration, his team reduced the number of supported applications to just 30. “We didn’t have enough people or enough time,” he said. It was decades old, badly commented, and didn’t follow modern coding and development paradigms.” Developers willing to work on the system were hard to come by, and when someone new did come on board, it would take six months to get them up to speed. “We spent a lot of time supporting those applications on a legacy codebase. “We had 90 custom applications that supported our finance organization,” he says, that were originally built using PL/SQL and the Grails Framework. Reducing technical debt was CIO Matthew Gunkel’s objective when his team decided to migrate the University of California Riverside’s ERP system to Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials. Here’s how other IT executives tackle the problem. To bring growth in, some level of modernization has to occur, and you still have to pay down technical debt.” “But even if you decide to retain legacy systems, that doesn’t mean you do nothing. “Most CIOs are managing cost by maintaining the core ‘as is,’ just trying to hold on and stay within that ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mantra,” she says. Linda Ivy-Rosser, VP and research director at Forrester, knows all about dilemmas like these. “It’s not like you can jam all the factors into a machine and it pops out the answers,” she says. The key to deciding how long to keep a technology lies in figuring out where you get the best return on investment, and while moving off Db2 might sound like a no-brainer, there’s nothing easy about the decision process. Most importantly, they needed good support.
Also, identity and access management has been problematic, and support for AIX today is a specialized skill set. “We decided to prioritize the elimination of some pervasive technologies that have become too expensive relative to comparable products, and where support was lacking,” she said.
For Jo Abernathy, CIO at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC), it was time to just walk away from the healthcare company’s aging IBM Db2 databases running on AIX.
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