The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living. An apt expression for the basic conundrum
posed by all legacy IT systems. Why upgrade a system when it works?
When does the risk of the new diminish to toll the death of the
old?
Computer systems that deal in pounds and pence are at the
heart of the IT that runs some of the UK's biggest
banks. They are inflexible and expensive to maintain, but they
get the job done. They are hideously complex to replace, but
ill-suited to gaining a single view of each customer.
Banks are turning to middleware to enable them to reuse
legacy systems to create new products and
services. More radically, Abbey, for example, replaced all legacy
systems as it integrated to the global banking platform of its
parent Santander, Partenon, in order to gain a single view.
BT also says it wants to get more intimate with its
customers. "We want to behave like a small company," chief
executive Ian Livingstone has said. Meanwhile, the company's Global
Services head François Barrault is evangelising for a strategy that
combines a focus on core competence with a mantra of collaboration
with suppliers and customers, in a context set by an ever
toughening economic climate.
BT is at once enabled and hampered by the force of legacy.
Broadband competition, from the likes of Virgin Media, is driving
it to plan a £1.5bn investment in a fibre optic
network in the UK. For small businesses this could level the
playing field, enabling them to behave like large companies. For
big companies it could make more of a reality of the
videoconferencing dream that fuels the
telecommuting fantasies of stressed out office wage slaves.
Whether next-generation broadband will deliver on this promise
depends on the strength of the impetus from the market, and the
scale of the impact of the technology itself. And whether banks
will slough off their legacy systems depends on what specific
imperatives are imposed on financial services firms by the
worsening economic climate.