Unsupported Systems

As time goes by it never ceases to amaze me that companies find themselves in the position of having their corporate information in an unsupported legacy system.

I plead with people to make sure they do not fall into this situation!

Many companies have merged/gone out of business/change focus over the years and sometime it can be hard to justify embarking on huge migration projects "just to stay where we are". My suggestion is to be proactive with senior management and convey to them how much intellectual property is tied up in the unsupported system.

The simplest way to do this is to develop a risk mitigation plan. The contents of this should address
  • What are the likely failures of the unsupported system
  • The probability that each will happen
  • The action to either mitigate the risk occuring or correct the problem
  • The impact the failure would have on the department and the business
Do this on Monday! IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO!

I cannot stress enough that there are systems and migration paths out there (and obviously people wanting to take you money to do it :-) ) but please do it!

Choose a new system based on the track record of the company. You are going to store your company's second most valuable asset in this system so you need to know that the company will be there for a long time.

.........

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