Legacy is a good word. Legacy means tried and tested. Some of the best stories in the world are legacy stories that have not fundamentally changed for a long time – they have endured and been passed down through generations of story telling. Most of us could tell at least one age old fable, at bedtime I still tell my kids the stories of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three Little Pigs, and Little Red Riding Hood.

Some may tell you that legacy systems are old hat and need to be replaced with modern systems – they may be right but what are they really saying? A modern system can mean something substantially different from a modern looking system. A system may be old, or rather aged, but consider why it is aged. If you are still using the same system that has been in use for 10 or more years then it could be that it is because the system works well and fits your business so why on earth would you want to change it? That said, modern systems do have their advantages, a quick look at SAP, Dynamics, and EnterpriseOne will show a huge feature set, large customer base, and user groups for support and networking.

The important thing to remember when choosing a system such as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)  is how well it fits within your business. If you need to adapt your business to work within the framework of the software then you are barking up the wrong tree. If you feel you need to adapt your business anyway then do it because the business needs it and find a system that supports the way you want to work – you really do not want to be hunting out a manual just to find out where your stock is.

With the ever growing presence of the Internet, the idea of information as king has finally become a realisation and the separation of content into data (i.e. XML) and formatting (i.e. CSS) streams has opened up many opportunities for the application of information. With recent programming languages adding the bells and whistles of graphical user interfaces to complement this information the temptation could be to change development platform. The value of a legacy system can easily get lost with a bewildering array of dashboards, widgets, gauges, charts and WYSIWYG print previews.

COBOL, the programming language for business, is still a great language and offers a mechanism for supporting not only legacy applications with indexed sequential files but also Java, .NET, XML and SQL data base structures. Understanding where your information is, how it is organised, how it fits together and most importantly of all, how to recover it quickly when faced with a system error in a 24×7 operation is of huge benefit and works well for us as our chosen development platform. In our environment, using a terminal emulation package for accessing an ERP, new users are sometimes surprised that the system does not utilise the mouse and that they have to keep CAPS LOCK on when entering data into input fields – but this takes moments to get used to and the flexibility of the system more than makes up for any cosmetic drawbacks.

When developing a software application aim to use a platform that will allow you to achieve your goals, never change your goals just to fit in with the latest buzz. From time to time we have been tempted to change the development platform of our ERP from COBOL to something newer like C# or Java but the current system works well, people understand how it works and there really would be little business benefit in changing for the sake of it – some of our code dates back to 1978. Finding experienced developers is sometimes given as a reason for keeping up to date with programming languages but we have never found a shortage of COBOL developers.

Whilst you can still get the bells and whistles in a legacy language like COBOL it is more important to focus on your business logic. I would much rather spend one week designing and testing an algorithm for stock rotation than drag and drop a number of widgets on the screen just because they look great. Losing some graphical wizardry does not mean a less functional system. Take Microsoft Power Shell for example, for a company that built its reputation on the GUI (Graphical User Interface), even they are realising the benefits and flexibility of adopting a text based interface approach.

So never be afraid of legacy and embrace your legacy system. Sure, it may need a dust down and some TLC from time to time but love it, take care of it and hand it down to future generations as a gift – safe in the knowledge that it served you well.

Related

• Cobol
• Ideas for a new common programming language
• SME/SMB and the ERP paradigm
• Online Backup
• Migrating Cobol To Server Express