Toolkit

Story: 'IT industry is ageist' says Intel chairman

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Craig Barrett is right to point out that some companies may need to re-evaluate their existing IT systems, as COBOL and Fortran programmers reach retirement age.

However, with 80 per cent of all companies still reliant on their "legacy" systems and 180-200 billion lines of COBOL in existence today, it is unlikely that the need for legacy skills will diminish significantly in the foreseeable future. Indeed, these legacy applications have been built up over a huge period of time, and embody data, processes, rules and concepts that are uniquely entwined with the business - so "ripping and replacing" them would be wholly unacceptable for many companies.

As such, companies must act now to avert a potential skills crisis, and must do so by first getting a better understanding of where the real value lies within their legacy application portfolio. Only then can organisations accurately assess the impact of any loss of legacy skills or business knowledge. Armed with such an understanding, IT departments can invest accordingly - in modern tooling, capable of bringing productivity gains to offset the loss of development staff, and in modern platforms, through application migration, thereby removing the dependance on legacy platform skills.

In a world where delivering business value depends on the ease with which core business systems can be opened up to contemporary architectures and fast-moving delivery channels, competitive advantage will come to those most able to bridge the old and the new. Making legacy skills more accessible to the new generations of IT staff is a vital piece in this endeavour.

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