No, at least not yet. Google returned about 430 instances, many relating to a GE product. What I’m getting at is the shift that information technology vendors need to make in order to serve the mission of their customers, whatever that mission looks like. Gone are the days when monolithic IT approaches were brought into unsuspecting organizations under the guise of “re-engineering”, a trend that began when I was a BCIT neophyte studying Operations Management in the early 1980s. We laughingly called ourselves the “Op-Man Axemen”, not realizing that the Re-engineering movement would actually put a lot of people out of work in favor of automation solutions.
These automation solutions now form the fabric of what is called “legacy” systems today. Characterized by stovepipe and (often) client/server architecture, arcane and/or obsolete code (except COBOL still soldiers on), and green screen terminals, legacy systems represent a crumbling foundation upon which many medium and large-scale enterprise and government operations are built. It is no wonder that the term “legacy modernization” is becoming an increasingly-heard siren call.
The market has, of course, responded with a flood of out-of-the-box “solutions” for these old software systems, mostly in the flavor of technology fixes that leaves the code base as-is but connected to the web, or converted into a modern language, resulting essentially in a GIGO* situation. Tools-only approaches still ignore the business, and are therefore the antithesis of “Business Centricity”.
At a provincial government Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) modernization project we recently completed, the story was much more than dollars saved (~$280,000 per month), screens reduced (4,100 down to 650), reduction of code base (2.4m LOC of Natural to 250K LOC of Java) and elimination of batches. These are just the IT and brute cost metrics. The real story lies in the significant streamlining of business operations that result in lower costs and improvements in productivity, customer service, security and business intelligence, just to name a few.
Massive hierarchical menus were reduced to attractive web-based UIs with drop-down menus. The entire system now is entity-based, around the driver, so any piece of information entered, such as a license plate, ticket number, etc. automatically locates the driver and exposes all of the relevant information about that individual. Data is now shared with the (also modernized) Vital Statistics system so birth certificates, marriage/divorce certificates, etc. can all be accessed directly from the driver. Taxes can be calculated at the time of a transaction, such as a vehicle purchase, rather than shuffled off to a tax group for later deciphering. You get the picture. These are benefits above and beyond the computer system operating costs, and they provide tangible ROI for many years to come.
We have found that the actual modernization of the application comes at the end of the process. It must be front-ended by careful consultation with business stakeholders, IT stakeholders and C-level executives. In order to serve the business needs for agility and competitive advantage, legacy replacement strategies need to grow from a business-centric approach.
Perhaps someday we’ll see Business-centric Modernization, or BCM. Just what we need. Another technology industry abbreviation to kick around.
- Chris Dollard
* Garbage In, Garbage Out
