Legacy IT? No problem
Maybe it’s time to press the pause button on artificial intelligence (AI). While the industry is dead set on promoting the benefits of multi-agent AI systems, the CIOs in many organisations anticipate more and more IT headaches.
It’s called legacy IT for a reason, because it works. Gartner repackaged the naming somewhat when it began referring to systems of record. But that’s very much the fundamental of what these legacy IT systems do. They are repositories of enterprise data, customer records, transactions and the structured information that helps businesses to manage cash flow. If data is the lifeblood of the global economy then these so called systems of record, underpinned by legacy IT cannot simply be discarded as a swipe left gesture.
At a recent CIO event in London, delegates were asked to consider the question of whether legacy IT is holding their organisations back. Many of the core billing and transaction processing systems we rely on in our day to day lives stem back from systems originally built in the 1980s and 1990s.
One has to consider the programming gymnastics occuring to fulfill customer expectations for a flashy mobile app with instant access to their information – such as in banking, smart meter readings, flight and hotel bookings or other customer-facing services they use – with a core IT system built in the era of offline and batch processing.
Yet this is how we see the world today: a modern app, acting as a thin veneer hiding a behemoth of wrapper code that makes a legacy system look to the outside world like it’s thoroughly modern.
As with every hype cycle, the industry is yet again banging on the doors of CIOs, insisting that they have the solution to a problem the IT department doesn’t even think it has.Yes the organisation does run legacy IT but is it a problem? If it was, it would have been replaced a long time ago.
Tech firms will rightly point out that the product is no longer in support, which is a fair comment, as the majority of these systems were originally developed decades ago. But in regulated industries, organisations have a duty of care to ensure their IT systems remain secure. And most organisations are beginning to realise the importance of defence in depth when it comes to cybersecurity.
The discussions at the CIO event suggest that CIOs will inevitably be asked by their boss about the “legacy IT problem”. Forget total cost of ownership data, CIOs need to be great storytellers, captivating their bosses with insights into the art of the possible, if legacy IT is not tampered with.