Sunsetting Systems In the Name of Innovation
CIO tells us that we should split our IT budget about 50/50 between maintenance of systems and new projects. Most companies find that pretty hard to do. The operation is what’s driving revenue today, so we apply resources to maintenance tasks instead of innovative projects that may or may not make us money in the future – and those who do successfully innovate find themselves with new systems for which they need to budget maintenance.
CIO’s incisive recommendation is to virtualize, move to the cloud, standardize, plan ahead, and promote the vision. I would add to that one crucial but problematic practice: decommission the legacy systems. This is an easy to thing to ignore or delay, since there are often staunch defenders of these systems and their uprooting takes time and resources. The only way to keep the “keeping the lights on” budget under control is to turn off as many lights as you turn on. Of course it’s not quite that simple, and if you need to make a business case you should take a look at this analysis of the cost of complexity by Robert Hillard. But sooner or later you’ll maximize the efficiencies to be had from CIO’s prescription of modern architectures and good management. In order to pay for the new you have to turn off the old.
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