Artificial Intelligence for Life

It is true that legacy systems still run the majority of the world’s largest companies. These applications might even appear or have the perception to be operating like a champion racehorse, but in fact they might be trudging along more like an old mule.

The chances are you’re your company is using a legacy system such as Access, FoxPro, Excel, Filemaker and some others. These legacy systems are built on tools that no doubt are great tools, but at the time were used to solve a business problem that was experienced a long time ago.

You also realise these applications were developed by someone in your company who knew how to use these tools. The business decided that it would be much faster and cheaper to build some of your business applications using these tools from scratch.

Over time, you added more functionality to the point where what started as a simple application is hard to support, hard to customise, undocumented, and yet is a vital part of your business.

The fact is, legacy systems spell R-I-S-K.

You might find some of these systems may have been in production for as long as 30 or 40 years, are stable, but inflexible and made brittle by years of ad-hoc maintenance enhancements.

This inflexibility and fragility make legacy systems difficult and expensive to maintain. It has been reported that 60 to 80 percent of IT budgets, on average are spent on maintaining legacy applications and the mainframe style infrastructure they run on.

Previous research had put the figure between 50 to 70 percent suggesting that the expense of maintaining these systems is growing as they continue to age.

Application frameworks like BPM can provide your business with a robust, scalable and flexible platform and can be configured to address your key business requirements.

You will get the added value of integration with other Microsoft productivity applications and familiar Outlook or web based interfaces to increase your ROI, ease of use, and user acceptance.

If legacy systems are being used to manage entities like people, places, events, assets, or other custom records, you can take advantage of the BPM platforms and move your vital legacy systems to a platform that is supported, portable, current, and best of all, specifically designed to help you manage information in a business process.

The applications you build in BPM are built on a business application platform instead of a raw database/forms development tool. The entities you create can be easily understood, and things like dates, people, emails, and documents will inherit appropriate capabilities if you use them in your application.

Additional advantages of using BPM  over legacy systems include;

• Native communication capabilities for emailing and sharing information.
• Built-in workflow engine to help you design business process using your custom entity data.
• Integration with your Outlook tool-bar to allow easy access to the application with a consistent Outlook look and feel.
• Web-based interface for access from anywhere without a client install.
• Metadata framework that provides addition of fields, labels, forms, etc. As a business administrator and does not require a developer or DBA.
• A starting package of entities that you can modify including contacts, articles, activities and many more.
• Define relationships between entities that will automatically update the application appropriately without significant rework.
• Robust enterprise reporting and searching capabilities without requiring custom development to implement them.

There will be times when replacing your legacy systems may not be the best option for your business. If the change cannot be managed without the company becoming too destabilised. In either case, you can avoid or mitigate either scenario through careful planning and from a staged implementation.