Mark: Management control is the big issue… the challenge I’ve witnessed is that managers don’t have control _now_ with the legacy process. Because forms and processes need to be managed by a central group and _not_ the business unit or the actual operations group involved, changes become hard to make, get made using bad assuptions – or just don’t happen.

What you see is a lot of forms/process badly out of sync with the actual facts on the ground – and operations staff resorting to some undocumented/ad-hock/unmanaged kludges when the legacy screens or forms don’t allow them to do what actually needs to get done.

So if you talk to ops staff in deep bowels of the back office, they’ll tell you things like “oh we just ignore that whole section of the form because that hasn’t applied to the product since 2003″ and instead we put the real instructions in the memo field and use these checkboxes to mean something else except on wednesdays, and ‘Betty’ in the other dept knows what to do with it. (and everything “works” so long as Betty who gets paid $15/hr doesn’t quit or get hit by a bus tomorrow etc.) . – scary stuff

Mark: Management control is the big issue… the challenge I’ve witnessed is that managers don’t have control _now_ with the legacy process. Because forms and processes need to be managed by a central group and _not_ the business unit or the actual operations group involved, changes become hard to make, get made using bad assuptions – or just don’t happen.

What you see is a lot of forms/process badly out of sync with the actual facts on the ground – and operations staff resorting to some undocumented/ad-hock/unmanaged kludges when the legacy screens or forms don’t allow them to do what actually needs to get done.

So if you talk to ops staff in deep bowels of the back office, they’ll tell you things like “oh we just ignore that whole section of the form because that hasn’t applied to the product since 2003″ and instead we put the real instructions in the memo field and use these checkboxes to mean something else except on wednesdays, and ‘Betty’ in the other dept knows what to do with it. (and everything “works” so long as Betty who gets paid $15/hr doesn’t quit or get hit by a bus tomorrow etc.) . – scary stuff

Ref big banks: You ask a good question about legacy software…it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice – he can’t figure out how to turn it off…. On the other hand, how can you have management control if everybody is creating their own forms?

Ref big banks: You ask a good question about legacy software…it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice – he can’t figure out how to turn it off…. On the other hand, how can you have management control if everybody is creating their own forms?