James Taylor's Decision Management

Deborah Perelman wrote this nice little piece over on CIO Insights today - 7 Ways to Protect Legacy Systems When Boomers Retire. The article's focus was on the boomers who work in IT retiring but that's not your only problem. IT boomers might be the only ones who understand the innards of a systems but what about the boomers who understand what the systems are supposed to do? These business people are retiring too. In many ways this is a similar problem - these folks have skills and understanding that you cannot afford to lose. Yet many of them also perform roles for which you will not be able to hire replacements - look at the trouble insurers are having hiring new underwriters, for instance (check out this post on the coming "experience gap"). This means taking this expertise and putting it into the information systems you are going to use going forward. Interestingly this matches item #6 in Deborah's list:

6. Institute a formal program to regain intellectual property; technology and IT training is comparatively easy. IT must guard against the loss of business knowledge accumulated over years by these retiring workers

The difference, perhaps, is that the business knowledge is being captured not as static documents or in a wiki but as executable business rules that drive system behavior. Not only does this approach "save" the knowledge, it also helps streamline processes and systems by automating decisions. Replacing the code in your legacy systems that implement this business logic with a decision service can also dramatically reduce the cost of maintaining the application as many people find that most of the change requests relate to this business logic, now separated out into an easy to maintain environment. You can, in fact, give your mainframe a new brain.

Deborah also quotes Phil Murphy of Forrester, about whose work I have blogged before - Business rules and the application knowledge deficit and Here's one way to strengthen weak application maintenance processes.

Technorati Tags: agility, BRMS, business rules, legacy modernization, rule management