Managing Legacy

legacy ( leg·a·cy) n. pl. leg·a·cies 1. Money or property bequeathed to another by will. 2. Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past: a legacy of religious freedom. See synonyms at heritage. From Middle English legacie, office of a deputy, from Old French, from Medieval Latin lgtia, from Latin lgtus, past participle of lgre, to depute, bequeath.

Only in information technology is the word legacy spoken as if it meant “problem.” A “legacy application” is an often crucial business program that has become a candidate for upgrade, re-hosting, integration or replacement. Once that happens, it’s no longer “legacy,” no longer a problem from the IT view. It’s just another piece of code, maybe even in the same thirty-year-old form it always has been.

It’s important to remember that, to the organization as a whole, a “legacy application” is something quite different. Far from being a problem, it’s the mature application that yields the most value, precisely because of its legacy. It is a business asset that is tried, tested, debugged, in use – and best of all, paid for. In most cases, a given “legacy application” recovered its cost long ago, sometimes long before the people who now depend on it even began their careers.

Unfortunately, that aspect of legacy – as something inherited – is its shortcoming for IT staff, who must keep the application running, build on it, and make it work with new programs. For some, that can mean maintaining an aging native platform that calls for scarce or costly programming skills. For others, it’s the pain of realizing that critical upgrade – say, Web-enabling the system as a whole – may require an investment that will never be recovered.

But to assess an application solely in monetary terms is to see only its costs while ignoring its worth. In the heat of modernization, it’s easy to overlook where true value lies. It’s not in the infrastructure, but in the knowledge that builds it. Not in the technical tools or skillsets, but in the business experience that guides them. Not in the systems, but in the people who use them.

A legacy application’s value is not in the resources that it takes to run it, but in its benefits to those who use it. This is a commonplace in IT. In practice, however, the older the system, the more likely this factor– the business value of the “legacy app” – is overlooked. A flashy Web page may win admiration (and new jobs) for its designers, but it can also disrupt the productivity of users accustomed to the green-screen menu it replaces.

It can be done: old and new systems can co-exist and work together. Sierra has made it happen for nearly two decades and we’re doing it today.

To modernize existing technology, any technology, you must understand its business effects and value at a fundamental level. Do that – do that first – and you’re on your way to building powerful, robust, flexible, and well-integrated business systems that host tomorrow’s legacies.

Especially if no one calls them that.