Over the past 40+ years, our nation’s businesses, organizations and Federal, State and Local government agencies have invested trillions of dollars to develop powerful software that successfully runs critical functions for their respective organizations without fail on a daily basis. Even today, these applications, containing hundreds of billions of lines of out of date programming code, are among the most valuable corporate and organizational assets in our economy.
Unfortunately, over the decades, these legacy systems have not kept up with the pace of new strategic technological innovation. Though this software is now several generations behind the latest technology, these applications continue to provide essential operational support to our nation’s corporations, organizations and government agencies.
Collectively, our corporate and political leaders, and our IT industry have turned a blind eye to the risks posed by these aging legacy applications. For the past 15 years, the overwhelming investment in strategic software has focused on deploying modern technology to the front end, “public-facing” applications while leaving the back end, “back office” functionality where it has been since the 70’s and 80’s or before.
This incremental “kick the can” practice has led to nationwide complacency regarding these inflexible, fragile systems. When consumers of these systems access modern, front end applications, they assume that the systems are state of the art. Few realize that behind the front end veneer, most of the workload is performed by cumbersome, outdated legacy applications with a dwindling number of resources capable of supporting them.
The recent Coronavirus pandemic and our government’s response to the catastrophe has publicly and decisively exposed the grim reality about the true state of our nation’s critical enterprise systems.
As the U.S. economy was largely shut down resulting in an historic loss of jobs, the CARES Act was passed to inject urgently needed funds into our ailing economy. Though the Federal government acted swiftly to pass this legislation, the outdated systems in most states have been unable to process applications for the new unemployment benefits provided for in the law.
This crisis has revealed the threat posed by our collective failure to face, accept and address the challenge of updating the nation’s most critical infrastructure – its aging legacy applications. Though this is one of the first nationally recognized failures of this magnitude, it will not be the last. It is only a matter of time before other outdated legacy systems suffer the same fate with severe consequences to the corporations and governments that depend on them.
In subsequent blogs over the next few weeks, I will discuss the threats posed by this crumbling infrastructure, the limitations of ineffective stop gap solutions and will ultimately propose how we can successfully transform these applications. Doing nothing is no longer a viable option.
ETS can help you make the transformation https://www.etsassociates.com/contact-us.
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