With many experts in legacy systems approaching
retirement age, users must retain IT know-how and identify which
skills need to be handed on.
It has often been suggested that there is an impending skills
crisis as the staff needed to maintain ageing legacy systems are
themselves approaching retirement. The first thing to consider is
precisely which skills are at risk.
Only after they have been identified can we provide a coherent
statement about whether there is indeed a crisis looming. This may
seem obvious, but to say there will be a legacy or mainframe skills
shortage is of limited usefulness until we are more specific about
which particular applications and languages, or systems software
and operating environments, we are referring to.
There is a world of difference between the skills required to
manage a legacy platform and those required to maintain the
applications that run on it.
Mainframe systems administrators, for example, who are
responsible for job schedules, systems security, operating system
upgrades and the like, have different skills to the application
developers creating the company's business logic in languages like
Cobol, PL/I and Fortran.
Some of these skills are essential to ensure business
continuity. Others are less so, depending on IT's strategy. Knowing
which is which is the next step in understanding whether you have a
skills crisis within your organisation.
This is especially true when you consider that each skill is
responsible for its own piece of business. Ignore them or confuse
them, at your peril.
Only when a company undertakes an enterprise-wide application
audit, highlighting the respective cost:value performance of each,
can it recognise which legacy systems deserve to be taken forward
and which will continue to need for the skills that support it.
An audit of this kind will also help to identify which
applications can be extended within their existing environments and
which ones will find new life, and deliver greater value, on a more
contemporary platform such as Windows, Unix or Linux.
Much of the concern at the heart of the legacy skills dilemma is
in regard to the age of the workforce. The popular view is that
many of the staff with appropriate skills will soon be retiring,
taking with them, as they leave, not only the systems expertise
they have accumulated, but also much of the business knowledge they
acquired through years spent moulding information technology to the
ever-changing contours of the corporation.
This certainly is an issue, with the average age of US federal
government workers just under 50, and a recent survey across Cobol
programmers in the US finding the average age to be between 42 and
49.
However, given that most of these workers still have a decade or
more of regular employment ahead of them, the concern is less one
of replacing their technical skills, important though these might
be and more about preserving the business knowledge that they
possess.
Organisations must act now to map out their legacy applications
portfolios in order to achieve a greater awareness of just how
significant any loss of knowledge might be when staff members
leave.
Separating strategic business knowledge from commodity IT
skills, or indeed the skills associated with applications for which
there is no strategic requirement, is a vital step in creating the
appropriate skills initiatives.
Another legitimate area of concern is the ability of
organisations to recruit and retain the talented staff required to
bridge the gap between the legacy world and the newer worlds of web
services, Java and .net.
Not only has the number of university courses providing tuition
on core legacy skills been falling, but also in some areas the
levels of attendance on computer-related courses in general is in
decline, with the UK IT attendance levels, for example, reportedly
about 30% lower than three years ago.
Where courses are still available for legacy skills, both the
business and academic worlds acknowledge that teaching a language
in isolation is no longer a priority. The requirement is for
interoperability. This is reflected both in the shape of courses
appearing on the academic curriculum, and in the fact that systems
integrators are retraining legacy workers with more contemporary
skills. EDS, for example, has recently embarked on a retraining
exercise for thousands of its mainframe veterans, updating them
with the latest Java and .net web services skills.
With students receiving, in many cases, the most basic level of
education on legacy systems, the onus falls heavily on industry to
put its own house in order. The expectations and aspirations of the
developers now entering IT departments for the first time are quite
different to those of previous decades.
Organisations must acknowledge this and offer career
opportunities in a way which appeals to new recruits, eager to
populate their CVs with IT's more fashionable offerings. They must
then ensure that career development opportunities continue to
reflect those attitudes.
Today's new IT professionals, typically, do not aspire to linear
career paths, aligned around a single piece of technology, but
rather relish the chance to swap roles more frequently.
Organisations can use this to their advantage as they introduce
pockets of legacy technology on a project-by-project basis,
building the services and business components required of an agile,
process-orientated IT infrastructure.
The technology with which analysts and programmers work on
legacy applications has moved on. Regardless of deployment platform
(mainframe, Windows, Linux or Unix) legacy applications can be
developed using the rich, graphical functionality of the Microsoft
Windows environment, supporting all language variants, databases
and OLTP features, and automating the creation of web services for
integration with Java and .net.
Organisations looking to encourage the uptake of legacy skills
by the new breed of IT staff passing through their doors must
destroy the myth that the language is as antiquated as the
green-screen and batch-orientated tools once used to code it.
Furthermore, with Cobol sitting alongside Visual Basic, C# and
Asp.net within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment there is no
need for organisations to base their investment decisions on
techno-religious debates about which programming language is the
best for the job.
Legacy languages like Cobol have proven their value to the
business. Legacy services become simply another piece of the
heterogeneous landscape of the IT world.
Contemporary platforms are putting increasing pressure on the
mainframe, and the mainframe world itself is embracing Linux, Java
and web services, constantly eroding the divide between the old and
the new.
With retirement of key legacy workers still some way off, there
is plenty of time for IT directors to ensure a smooth transition of
skills, but they can only do this by embracing the cultural needs
of today's recruits, and ensuring that existing staff have every
opportunity to impart their knowledge of the legacy systems and the
business processes they encapsulate.
Mike Gilbert is director of product strategy at legacy
development tools company Micro Focus