Forced To Change
Best Laid Plans
The thought that my car had several thousands of miles left in it before I would eventually need to trade it was brought to an abrupt end one dark and rainy night this November when someone drove into the side of me writing my car off in less time than it took for my passenger-side airbags to deploy. 😒
It was all a bit of a shock. Fortunately no one was hurt.
At the time I was half way through a building project at home and this was the least convenient time for this to happen to say the least!
Sometimes change is forced upon us before we'll admit to the inevitability of it. Resisting change is futile (ready or not) but it's far better when you are ready and have planned for it on your own terms.
From Service Schedules To End Of Life
After nine years of ownership I'd got my car maintenance expectations down to a tee. I had accepted that as my car aged I would have to replace the odd part as it wore out as well as replacing the usual durable components like tyres, windscreen wipers, oil, brake fluid etc. The costs all seemed good value, quite manageable and par for the course.
Little was I to know that I'd soon be seeing my crumpled prized asset driven away on the back of a transporter heading for the crusher.
Legacy Systems
These days I work with a lot of "legacy" systems. I find the term "legacy system" somewhat amusing as many of these systems take on more and more traffic each year and perform millions of business transactions worth billions of pounds. So how come they're tagged as "legacy" systems?
Some systems become legacy when technical strategy changes and they no longer fit.
For others, legacy can creep in like a reluctant vehicle repair that you choose to put off for a while. Such decisions turn into "technical debt". For example, choosing not to upgrade the OS or the version of middleware, or choosing to stay on old hardware because it's always been reliable (so far that is) will put you at risk and on borrowed time.
Big organisations with large IT estates have hard decisions to make about how they spend their IT budgets. The once green field has become a brown field and it's no easy task to balance the budget investing in new technology versus maintaining existing solutions. I imagine it sometimes requires the judgement of Solomon, especially when it's so key to business success.
Prized Assets Destined For The Crusher
Seeing systems as prized assets can change the way we think about them but ultimately it doesn't change their destiny. Just as parts on a car wear out and need replacing so systems wear out and need replacing. Don't wait until you're forced to change them.
Maintenance might mean adding more memory or storage or upgrading to the latest security protocol but even doing this won't stop your prized asset becoming obsolete as the hardware ages (or fails) and the software components go out of support.
Version <<Next>>
Planning for your next car usually starts fairly soon after you get a new one. There's a "must have" feature list that you won't compromise on next time. (For me it was heated seats and a built-in sat-nav this time around.)
We need to look at prized application assets the same way. A project may introduce something new or take something to a new level but it's far from the end of the story. What's next?
Microsoft founder Bill Gates had a whole list of what he wanted to do next with his products and spent decades fulfilling those plans and doing quite well for himself along the way. 😊
Recognising The Half Life Of Software And Hardware Assets
Things have changed radically in the IT world in recent years and the idea of "renting your hardware" (which is really what Cloud Computing is about) when combined with containerisation puts a whole new spin on how you plan and manage your prized application assets.
You no longer have to wring every last penny of value out of your hardware assets to recoup your capital expenditure. You're no longer tied to lengthy contracts. Now you only need to pay for what you use and you have the freedom to scale up or down with demand instead of sizing your hardware for peaks that don't happen most of the time.
You can now start thinking about the next incarnations of your applications and what they might look like. After all, someone else is taking the risk with their capital expenditure! You are free to decide when, where and how and can welcome change on your own terms. Only the laggards who resist change will be forced to change when they least want or expect to.
Merry Christmas!
Thank you for liking this page.
Tim Simpson
18th December, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini