CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
The first of the seven principles of managing legacy technology laid out by the Cabinet Office is “aim to use continuous improvement planning to keep your technology up to date”.
Enacting incremental upgrades and patches is, from a technical standpoint, the key to avoiding potential issues with legacy systems – which can crop up even if the technology in question is comparatively new, according to one attendee.
“Without continuous improvement, legacy can rise up,” they said. “If you’ve got a new product which no-one is looking at because it isn’t 20 years old yet, then it just sits there and becomes legacy very, very quickly.”
Even with a careful approach to deployment and a commitment to ongoing upgrades, government tech professionals can still be subject to the caprices of IT firms.
The digital leader of one executive agency said: “I currently have a service that has been live since September, and I have been hit twice with this legacy thing… it is the vendor: they have changed something and taken a component out. This is a modern, digital service, using the latest technology. But the vendor has twice taken the service down. You build something new, and you try to future-proof things – but there are different types of exposure.”
Another participant, from a big-city local authority, agreed that “we all try and design so we don’t get legacy”.
But, without the processes – and the ongoing budget – to support the approach of continuous improvement, systems and services can go for long periods without a proper assessment of risk.
“We often design a service for a lifespan… which is possibly tied into a contract with a supplier,” they said. “Sometimes the legacy issue comes up because those services are designed for two or three years, but don’t get reviewed for eight or 10 years: there isn’t the capacity in the public sector to go round and review everything at every point that it needs. It is only where you can build in that continuous improvement that you cut out the legacy. Otherwise, quite often what you see is a service that is built however many years ago and it has got to the point that it is creaking, and we are fixing it and designing a service for the next period of time, rather than taking that continuous improvement approach.”