The Great Legacy Skills Debate

The skills crisis is once again big news. Gartner reports that most CIOs do not currently feel they have the right people in place to achieve their objectives; objectives which, in 2005, are more firmly focused on business innovation and bottom line contribution than on pure infrastructure enablement. It is perhaps with this emphasis on results that two thirds of CIOs currently consider themselves at risk when assessing their CEOís perception of the IS organisation.

Through 2004, CIOs drove investment in infrastructure with an emphasis on cost containment. Now, despite little in the way of increased budgets, they are being asked to shift that focus towards growth by ìimproving, integrating and innovating operations using existing technologies and applicationsî IT must deliver a bedrock of quality services on which a strategy of innovation can be built and utilised.

But for business growth to be delivered on the back of ìexisting technologiesî, IT departments must first acknowledge and embrace the value of their so-called ëlegacyí systems. These bespoke and often heavily customised applications are the cornerstones of the business world. Written some fifteen or more years ago, and currently attributed with running 75% of the worldís business transactions, they clearly represent the bulk of the IT departmentís ëvalue addí. Unlocking this value is the key to ITís contribution to the business. Finding the right skills with which to do it, therefore, is high on the list of priorities for the CIO.

Crisis? What Crisis?
It has often been suggested that there is an impending skills crisis as the staff needed to maintain ageing legacy systems are themselves approaching retirement. The first thing to consider is the question of precisely which skills we mean. Only then can we provide a coherent statement on whether there is indeed a crisis looming. This may seem obvious, but to say there will be a ëlegacyí or ëmainframeí skills shortage is of limited usefulness until we are more specific about which particular applications and languages, or systems software and operating environments, we are referring to.

There is a world of difference between the skills required to manage a legacy platform and those required to maintain the applications that run on it. Mainframe systems administrators, for example, who are responsible for job schedules, systems security, operating system upgrades and the like, have very different skills to the application developers creating the companyís business logic in languages like COBOL, PL/I and FORTRAN.

Some of these skills are essential to ensure business continuity. Others are less so, depending on ITís strategy. Knowing which is which is the next step in understanding whether you have a skills crisis within your organisation. This is especially true when you consider that each one is responsible for its own vital piece of those 75% of business transactions. Ignore them, and more relevantly confuse them, at your peril.

For an IT department to drive business innovation, it is vital that it understands the difference between the baby and the bathwater. Business applications that continue to run companies on a daily basis, and contain valuable business rules, are often marked for retirement simply because the platforms on which they run are no longer supported, or have become less cost-effective than more contemporary environments. Understanding the true necessity and value of IT skills requires an understanding of this distinction.

Only when a company undertakes an enterprise application audit, highlighting the respective cost / value performance of each, can they recognise which legacy systems deserve to be taken forward, and for which there will continue to be a need for the skills supporting it. An audit of this kind will also help identify which applications can be extended within their existing environments and which ones will find new life, and deliver greater value, on a more contemporary platform such as Windows, UNIX or Linux.

Out with the oldÖ
Much of the concern at the heart of the ëlegacy skillsí dilemma is in regard to the age of the workforce. The popular view is that many of the staff with appropriate skills will soon be retiring, taking with them, as they leave, not only the systems expertise they accumulated over the years, but also much of the business knowledge they acquired through years spent moulding information technology to the ever changing contours of the corporation.

This certainly is an issue, with the average age of US federal government workers just shy of 50, and a recent survey across COBOL programmers in the US finding the average age to be between 42 and 49. However, given that most of these workers still have a decade or more of regular employment ahead of them, the concern is less one of replacing their technical skills, important though these might be, but more the business knowledge that they possess.

Organisations must act now to map out their legacy applications portfolios in order to achieve a greater awareness of just how significant any loss of knowledge might be when staff members leave. Separating strategic business knowledge from commodity IT skills, or indeed the skills associated with applications for which there is no strategic requirement, is a vital step in creating the appropriate skills initiatives.

- and in with the new
Another legitimate area of concern is the ability of organisations to recruit and retain the talented staff required to bridge the gap between the legacy world and the newer worlds of Web services, Java and .NET. Not only has the number of university courses providing tuition on core legacy skills been falling, but also in some geographies the levels of attendance on computer-related courses in general is in decline, with the UK, for example, reportedly some 30% lower than IT attendance levels from three years ago.

Where courses are still available for legacy skills, both the business and academic worlds acknowledge that teaching a language in isolation is no longer a priority. The requirement is for interoperability. This is reflected not only in the shape of courses appearing on the academic curriculum, but also in the fact that systems integrators are retraining legacy workers with more contemporary skills. EDS, for example, has recently embarked on a retraining exercise for thousands of its mainframe veterans, updating them with the latest Java and .Net Web services skills.

A question of culture
With students receiving, in many cases, the most basic level of education on legacy systems, the onus falls heavily on industry to put its own house in order. The expectations and aspirations of the developers now entering IT departments for the first time are quite different to those of previous decades. Organisations must acknowledge this, and not only offer career opportunities in a way which appeals to the career-hungry new recruits, eager to populate their CVs with ITís more fashionable offerings, but must then ensure that career development opportunities continue to reflect those attitudes moving forward.

Todayís new IT professionals, typically, do not aspire to linear career paths, aligned around a single piece of technology, but rather relish the chance to swap roles more frequently. Organisations can use this to their advantage as they introduce pockets of legacy technology on a project by project basis, building the services and business components required of an agile process-orientated IT infrastructure.

The technology with which analysts and programmers work on legacy applications has moved on. Regardless of deployment platform (mainframe, Windows, Linux and UNIX) legacy applications can be developed using the rich, graphical functionality of the Microsoft Windows environment, supporting all language variants, databases and OLTP features, and automating the creation of Web services for integration with Java and .NET. Organisations looking to encourage the uptake of legacy skills by the new breed of IT staff passing through their doors must destroy the myth that the language is as antiquated as the green screen and batch-orientated tools once used to code it. Furthermore, with COBOL sitting alongside Visual Basic, C# and ASP.NET within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment, there is no need for organisations to base their investment decisions on techno-religious debates about which programming language is the best for the job. Legacy languages like COBOL have proven their value to the business. Legacy services become simply yet another piece of the heterogeneous landscape of the IT world.

Survival of the fittest
Ultimately, we cannot ignore the fact that business, like nature, abhors a vacuum. When there is talk of a skills crisis in the legacy world, we hear of service providers developing their ability to satisfy demand. Academia moves at a slower pace, but is nevertheless working alongside the business world to ensure that needs are being met. Companies like Micro Focus and IBM have academic programmes designed to ensure that colleges and universities have the resources they need to teach ëlegacyí skills.

Contemporary platforms are putting increasing pressure on the mainframe, and the mainframe world itself is embracing Linux, Java and Web services, constantly eroding the divide between the old and the new.

With retirement of key legacy workers still some way off, there is plenty of time for the IT industry to ensure a smooth transition of skills, but it can only do this by embracing the cultural needs of todayís recruits, and ensuring that existing staff have every opportunity to impart their knowledge of the legacy systems and the business processes they encapsulate.

Mike Gilbert, Director of Product Strategy, Micro Focus