The Harbour Pilot

We have established that IT obsolescence is a problem. Unfortunately, to may of us that conjures up pictures of a 1979 Cadillac - a beautiful thing that still works, but it costs $20 to go shopping, and replacement parts are hard to find. This problem is a lot worse than that!

Compounding the obsolescence problem is the reality that IT has enormous dependencies on inter-operability.

Dependencies

This refers to the fact that software is dependent on the development environment (including the language, the compiler, the libraries of re-usable code in that environment), as well as various pieces of infrastructure such as database engines, webservers, and communication facilities. The development environment is often dependent on the operating system, the operating system is dependent on the hardware platform, and all three are dependent on such things as various internet protocols, hardware port standards, file structures and so on.
Now if any single piece of this puzzle changes – say, the database engine makes a significant performance or capability improvement, then all of the related pieces need to be updated. Worse yet, the previous versions still need to be maintained for backwards compatibility.
What if, over the course of six months, the database changes, a new level of hardware is introduced, the operating system system-calls are altered, the development libraries change, and the international standards body that implements an internet protocol change…. Suddenly, your implementation is in trouble. There will be upgrades, modifications and testing. Dealing with this will entail time, a loss of productivity, and money. Unless of course, you are yourself, a guru!

Coming back to our ’79 Caddy, the problem is not that it doesn’t work;

• it costs you a lot of money,
• it presents problems with clean air tests,
• it is difficult to retro-fit with new features like Geographical Information Systems that tell you where you are and where to turn left.

HowIt Plays Out

Suppose it was a crew truck for your renovation business. The inability to know where they are, how to get where they are going, where the closest lumber supplier is might present real competitive disadvantages. There comes a time when these losses outweigh the advantages of retaining the old piece of equipment. The same is true of IT assets.

In IT, the rate of obsolesce is made much higher because of these multiple dependencies. Any change in some barely recognized (by you) dependency can catch you flat-footed.

Bear in Mind

IT inter-operability dependencies mean that your window is much shorter than you think.

Question for You

Database dependencies – do you know what database your systems use? Accounting databases, operational databases, customer databases… do you know? Five years ago, Oracle databases owned the market -–now, they are moving towards Open Source‘ing their database environment through their MySQL Open Source competitor!