“The office has gone from being the place where you spend time with cutting ­edge technology, to a technological boneyard where you’re perpetually trapped about three years in the past.” (Ars Technica: “IT Consumerization and the Future of Work,” July 6, 2008)

These days consumers have access to absolutely amazing technology at retail prices. This technology comes in the form of great devices, fantastic apps and cloud services that work. In some sense, consumers are at the cutting edge of “cool” technology and it is no surprise that when a consumer crosses the threshold of an office and turns in to an employee, their sense of wonder disappears as soon as they have to login to a clunky PC to access their work email or use a cobbled together UI to process a transaction.

With the barriers to deploying tech so low (an intern, a credit card, a device with browser, the Internet plus SaaS = a deployed application), it should not surprise that employees bring new tech to the workplace. Why would an employee tasked with a project not simply set up a Google team site at no cost, rather than deal with IT to set up a Microsoft Sharepoint? The former allows the employee to do things themselves (and takes minutes), while the latter someone else has to set up the site (and takes hours or days). Why won’t a savvy sales exec deploy Salesforce behind the back of the IT department? There are some good reasons for this not to happen (security of information or spend co-ordination, for instance), but the demand for better technology is there. This opens up another opportunity for the technology executive: to co-opt this demand and drive the adoption of disruptive technologies to drive costs down, and make the user experience more in line with modern expectations.

The problem for corporations is that existing technology – especially that developed over time – gets expensive unless it is refreshed. Older technologies (hardware, software, devices) tend to drive risk, complexity (layers, interfaces, sFTP, data models/ silos and hard coded dependencies) and cost. Vendors such as EMC charge much more for supporting older disk technology than for replacing it periodically with newer technology. There is a reason for this: the older the tech, the scarcer the resources that are required to support it (rare labor skill sets, a dwindling supply of spare parts). This problem gets worse if technologies are installed with one-off customizations – especially when it comes to corporate software. Many corporations find themselves on very old software and hardware because such systems support key business processes (making them very sensitive to risk) while at the same time the complex job of upgrading systems deter business people from making an upgrade (giving vendors an incentive to charge a lot for support). Eventually, even the most gouging vendor will stop supporting old tech; and corporations have to take on a lot of risk, and invest in a huge amount of effort, to upgrade their core systems. And btw, if you are running unsupported systems, good luck getting security patches and performance upgrades or any cheap, timely help when something fails!

If any of the following indicators look familiar, then you may have a problem with old tech:

1) You have customized or in-house code running in production, with few or no programmers who can alter it, or do not have the source code.

2) You have DOS based applications.

3) You use Appliance based/black box technology that is 5+ years old, especially if the original vendor no longer exists.

4) You use windows XP or earlier.

5) You have a technology that locks your application into a specific browser version that is 2 or more versions older than current browser version.

6) You have software that cannot be virtualized.

8) You don’t use flat screen monitors.

9) You run hardware or software that is unsupported by the vendor.

10) You have applications or hardware that utilize non IP based network protocols.

11) You have any application written in COBOL, BASIC (visual or otherwise), FORTRAN, Assembler, JCL, or any language pre-1990s.

Such technology will drive employees away, tired of working and supporting old stuff while they see the world working on newer stuff and you can’t recruit new employees to work on dusty old objects. Worse, older technology is unlikely to be available on mobile and cloud based platforms and limits your ability to be agile and cost effective. It will also provide a poor brand impression to customers: nobody likes to spend a lot of time in a store while a clunky process keep you in there and your transaction takes ages (and requires a lot of paper and data re-entry).

So what is a responsible tech executive to do?

1) Make an inventory of your technology, and analyze it by priority and technology type.

2) Establish a roadmap, timeline and estimated costs to remove or replace various types of technology.

3) Make retirement / replacement an essential line item on your annual budget. Make sure your CFO and business partners understands the risk of cutting it from the budget and the cost cutting loss of opportunity.

4) Gain allies from the business, HR, marketing, Risk and Audit Management to bolster your case. Develop technology roadmaps for your clients to migrate safely to cloud or hybrid systems using modern applications, devices, data models and interfaces – with the appropriate security, Disaster Recovery and DRM concerns addressed.

There’s a lot more to discuss. Join me in the conversation.

Mike Ross <TechOpsExec@gmail.com>.

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