James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this Forrester piece on CIOs: Attack Weak Application Maintenance Processes That Stifle IT Productivity by Phil Murphy. He makes the great point that systems were built as if they would never have to change (instead of being built for change time) and that the current rapid pace of business change causes equally rapid systems change. Phil talks about the maintenance backlog winning the battle for application development resources and so limiting the ability of the IT department to add value. While I liked the paper, I felt that there was too much focus on the whole application - often there is a very variable level of maintenance between different parts of the application and I have discussed before a basic process for pulling out these high maintenance pieces and modernizing just them. There is a great customer story about renovating just the high maintenance/high value component from the DMV here in California. In general I think companies could well use business rules to improve application maintenance and that this could help particularly when modernizing legacy COBOL applications.

He made a couple of observations and recommendations I thought I would repeat:

• Poor Knowledge Transfer Techniques Increase Maintenance Costs
  True. One of the attractions of using business rules to modernize legacy applications is the increased readability of business rules over code.
• Use Tools And Technology To Leverage Greater Staff Productivity
  Could not agree more. You need to spend money to save money and, in this case I think companies could spend on enhancing some of their applications by moving the high-maintenance part over to business rules.
• Streamline Maintenance Processes To Increase Innovation Capacity
  Build new systems to reduce future maintenance by using business rules to avoid write-only code

Technorati Tags: application maintenance, business rules, legacy modernization, Forrester