Once a year, usually on a Saturday in the Spring, my town holds Spring Cleaning: Electronics Style. On that day, residents may bring any old electronics they may have sitting around to the community center and drop them off, where they are loaded on trucks and taken away to be recycled.
And while the eligible recyclables include pretty much anything you plug in, the star attractions are always computers. Thousands of them. It's quite a sight, actually, to see the parking lot turned into a gray graveyard of monitors, motherboards and modems. Looking at the lot each year, you would think each resident gets rid of three or four computers, which may not be all that far from the truth depending on how long you hold onto them after they've outlived their usefulness, which—in the grand scheme of things—isn't very long at all.
Technology is amazing. And then it's not. And then it's really not. And then it's downright laughable. (Remember when business people would carry around what could only be a called a telephone suitcase to make mobile calls?)
Well, the equivalent of my town's electronics recycling day happens in the corporate world all the time. Cleaning out yesterday's technology has become a part of the corporate culture. But pitching some monitors into a recycling bin is the easy part.
This month's cover story "The Future of IT", deals with a much more harrowing challenge for today's CIOs of having to clean up "a complex, expensive and infuriating past." As Krell states: "Legacy systems do not integrate easily or inexpensively with new technology. Yet, these systems exist and, at some point, must be dealt with in less of a reactive way and more of a final-solution way, where possible."
The "legacy system albatross" is very real and very daunting. It has created the ultimate gut-check moment for those CIOs brave enough, and with enough internal political clout, to suggest getting rid of them altogether to create something new entirely. These are the types of CIOs IT consultants want to work with, but they are, sadly, too few and far between. In the meantime, that Saturday in Spring is right around the corner.
Joseph Kornik
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
jkornik@consultingmag.com
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