CIOs discuss friction between legacy IT and innovation

A meeting of CIOs in London earlier this week put into focus the precarious balancing act CIOs have to perform in terms of innovating while keeping the lights on.

Looking at the tech companies exhibiting products and services at the CIO UK & Ireland event at the Langham Hilton, hosted by Citrus Events, made it clear that artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of innovation people want to hear more about. But legacy systems are often deeply embedded in organisational culture and structure, making it difficult to implement the required change without disrupting existing workflows.

CIO delegates raised concerns about compliance during a roundtable discussion, given that organisations need to ensure their technical debt is secure. “Our regulators demand that we have certain levels and certain strengths and certifications, like Cyber Essentials Plus certification. We have to do that,” said one delegate.

The roundtable discussion suggests that IT leaders should prioritise trust in their strategic goals, rather than narrowly focusing on technical debt.

One of the big challenges for IT leaders is that, in the past, IT systems were commissioned once by the business. They went through a formal specification process that was then signed off and passed to the software development team. After coding, testing and deployment, enterprise applications tend to move to the maintenance phase of the software lifecycle. The people who originally commissioned the project may well have moved on to another project, so it is then left to business users to provide the feedback that informs software improvements.

However, as is apparent from the roundtable discussion, legacy systems often carry outdated processes that may no longer align with current business goals. Business processes change, but the enterprise system rarely reflects such changes. Instead, it is often left to business users to work around the difference.

The consensus from the delegates who participated in the discussion was that by focusing on these systems, organisations can identify inefficiencies and streamline business processes. This work is essential before introducing new technology. In fact, IT leaders should aim to get the processes up to date, which means revisiting those previous conversations they had with the business when the enterprise software was originally specified.

One of the CIOs at the roundtable said: “We’ve got to understand, first and foremost, what our processes are within the organisation, and what it is we want to do.”

One of the points raised in the roundtable discussion was how enterprise IT systems should be specified. If business processes are effectively encoded in the software, then adapting the code as the business evolves is a major undertaking. CIO delegates at the roundtable recognised that agility should be built in right at the start, as the system is being specified, to ensure it can cope with changes that may happen in the future.

The challenge of business and IT alignment was also discussed, insofar as a CIO is not best placed to speak purely from a finance perspective. Rather than attempt to speak the language of a finance director, one of the delegates suggested an alternative strategy, involving the use of stories to explain business benefits.