Every conversation I have – no matter the size, age or complexity of a company – there is a need to retire and decommission technology. No debates the need, motive or desire = but what finally makes a company have that ‘AHH HAA’ moment?
We list here motivators or change for you to consider. Odds are it is a combination of all of them – but one bubbles up to get people in the room to talk about the topic.
- Merger/Acquisition – “System reconciliation” – One organizations buys another organization. Suddenly there is a 95% overlap of IT systems that need to be deduplicated. Merged. The acquired employees are put on the new payroll system and now you need to decommission the old one – but there is still legacy employee data that needs to be maintained.
- Legal Risk Exposure – When legal discovery takes place, is everything found based on the expectation of the judge and lawyers? Structured data, financial records, HR records, contracts, documents, emails. What about those files sitting on network drives?
- Compliance Exposure – HIPPA for a hospital, EPA for a refinery. NRC for a nuclear power plant, GDPR, SOX, FASB, that small city in Oklahoma that you need to validate tax payments from 10 years ago?
- Security Intrusion Exposure – End of life, end of service, no more security bug fixes. The best way outside hackers enter a corporate is through the least maintained platform.
- Data Center Consolidation – Through a combination of new servers, new storage, move to the cloud = it is time to clean out the IT basement.
- Platform Upgrades – Best example here is SAP. Moving from older SAP to HANA is a major lift-and-shift from an architecture and hardware perspective. But it also leaves a lot of data behind. You cannot move everything into HANA – it is just not feasible. So now what?
- IT Transformation – This is code for agile, cloud, subscription, services. Moving from on-premise Peoplesoft->to->Workday in the cloud. Siebel->to->Salesforce.com. IBM AS/400->Anything. But with this there is a lot of history that is wont move but needs to be maintained until appropriate system run-out and records retention policies are adhered.
After you read this list I am sure you have systems that fall into about every category. Platform 3 Solutions has the experience, methodologies, tools and understanding to help from the very beginning to take that first step. The acts of operating an ‘application decommissioning refinery’ is also more than people and technology – it is a culture of change. Let us know where you want to start.
