Take proactive steps to avoid urgent problems like sudden support loss and scarce skilled IT professionals.
Most of us whose Information Technology (IT) careers span multiple decades have grown accustomed to a pair of trends that seem to have been with us from the beginning: The pace of technology-driven change is an ever-increasing global phenomenon, and business pressures typically dictate that we constantly seek ways to “do more with less.” These two trends seem to feed each other relentlessly – executive leadership often counts on the former to enable the latter as a key element of strategy aimed at growth and profitability. Together, these trends often consume the lion’s share of IT leadership’s time and attention. Add in daily/weekly/monthly emergency priorities, and little bandwidth remains to address – or sometimes even to identify – the more gradually evolving critical situations that “aren’t today’s problem”.
Availability of ongoing support and maintenance for a well-designed and mature custom application that almost seems to take care of itself is one classic example of an issue that is never today’s problem – until it is. As application consultants we frequently encounter situations that fall into one of the following categories:
- Application support viability is clearly threatened in the easily foreseeable future by staff demographics, dwindling availability of skillsets, and/or by critical components that are effectively beyond end of support, but executive leadership is never quite ready to sponsor remediation of the issue – often because there are “plans to replace” the application.
- Application support is suddenly lost with little or no advance notice due to unexpected retirement, death, debilitating illness, service provider dissolution or undesirable acquisition, etc.
Ironically, applications that are critical to the very foundation of the business are sometimes most at risk because high-impact problems were addressed many years ago through modification or through simple but often undocumented manual support procedures. There may or may not be the occasional (or sometimes surprisingly frequent) “squeaky wheel”, but either way, these applications often go many years without receiving any attention because they appear to simply “sit in the corner and run”, and they aren’t high profile targets for further investment. In other words, these applications and the risks associated with their eroding support model can effectively become invisible.
“Applications that are critical to the very foundation of the business are sometimes most at risk.”
Applications that leverage the IBM i (iSeries, AS/400) platform present something of a textbook case study. Many companies continue to rely upon highly tailored custom applications that were written decades ago, that run on this extraordinarily reliable platform with very little attention required. Over time, the underlying support model gradually erodes, but it’s never “today’s problem” – until the day that it becomes “today’s problem”. Unfortunately, years of benign neglect can result in significant business interruption while IT leadership scrambles to get a new support model in place, while coming to grips with the double whammy of potentially high demand for limited skillsets coupled with environments that are poorly documented. While in the longer term market forces may address skillset demand/supply imbalances, in the shorter term there’s a good chance that the looming non-linear retirement trend for IBM i professionals will leave some poorly prepared organizations in an unenviable predicament.
Don’t let support for your critical applications fall prey to this trap. Reach out to us today to discuss a range of proactive steps to keep support of your critical applications from becoming “today’s problem.”
Written By:
Ray Pritchett
Director, Applications
Applications Solutions Group
