Managing legacy systems

Every CIO has to deal with high-risk, high-value, legacy systems. It helps to know as much about them as possible, a task more easily accomplished with an IT asset management (ITAM) repository, which tracks and cross-references procurement, contract, inventory, maintenance, entitlement management and retirement information for the software and hardware that a company owns. Once these systems are identified, pinpoint their risks, such as the likelihood and potential business impact of a specific application failure. It's also important to determine the relative business value of these systems and then overlay the risk of a given application with the value; by doing this, you'll clearly see when and why the business must migrate from these legacy systems and how much time remains to do so. Once it's time to migrate, make sure you're moving to a system that enhances business value while reducing risk. Aligning plans and designs with architecture standards helps to future-proof the new environment. It's also important to put mechanisms in place to reduce the chances that high-risk systems will return to the portfolio.

Learn more about managing legacy systems:
- read the article at CIO Canada