Legacy systems harder to maintain due to skills shortage

A new study from IT services provider Advanced shows 89 percent of large enterprises worldwide are worried they won't have access to the right IT talent to maintain and manage their legacy systems.

But the skill to modernize these systems are also scarce. Almost two-fifths (37 percent) of senior professionals -- including CIOs and Heads of IT -- admit their modernization programs have failed because they lack the depth and breadth of skills required for newer technologies like the Cloud. In addition 38 percent blame a lack of planning for the success of modernization projects.

The report looks at the challenges facing large enterprises worldwide with annual revenues of more than US $1 billion. It finds 78 percent of organizations have started at least one modernization program as a direct result of the pandemic -- but it has brought challenges. A third are worried experienced staff are retiring and taking their legacy skills with them, while 36 percent are concerned that people entering the workforce only have modern skills. In addition, 29 percent say their staff don't want to learn legacy skills, even though they are still in high demand.

As a real world example the report quotes The State of New Jersey which, at the start of the pandemic, saw hundreds of thousands of residents quickly submit applications to its unemployment system. This crashed the mainframes supporting critical applications, resulting in an urgent plea from the state's governor for COBOL programmers.

Tim Jones, Managing Director of Application Modernisation EMEA at Advanced, says:

The State of New Jersey isn't an isolated example. Many organizations worldwide are struggling to find the skilled staff needed to maintain and manage their critical systems. If programmers with expertise in the most prominent languages are retiring and taking their skills with them, large enterprises will continue to experience huge disruption to their operations.

And, as they move their mainframe estate to a modern environment like the Cloud, enterprises could also end up overcompensating on the skills imbalance by hyper focusing on recruiting modern skills and disregarding the need for legacy talent. It's important they cross-train existing talent to improve existing staff's ability to support both legacy and modern systems, particularly during and after a major modernization initiative.

The full report is available from the Advanced site.

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