Going Modern

A large percentage of outsourced, onshore and offshore resources, are skilled in XML, Java and other Internet-based languages and development techniques, meaning their ability to tinker with and add features to 3GL/4GL applications is limited at best and that cost savings of such as model is neutralized. Adding to the conversation is the acknowledgment that more than 200 million lines of COBOL code are currently in use while another five million are being written each year. This presents a challenge given the waning number of students studying computer science and the shrinking number of experts in legacy applications.

According to Gartner, “interviews conducted with IT sourcing managers across the Gartner client base hint at what’s to come: Many have seen price hikes of 10% to 15% in certain skills during the past year.”

Still, the dwindling, expensive legacy expert community is not the only IT population that needs to be addressed.  The rise of the millennium generation should also be top of mind.  Gartner research reports: “College students and 20-somethings are heading toward IT-related work in film, music, multimedia, gaming and Internet companies” and that “students enrolling in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the STEM disciplines – have declined in developed countries and risen in other countries.  In the United States for instance, computer science enrollment has dropped 39% since 2002.

The costs and reduction in the workforce of experienced legacy IT professionals combined with a shrinking pool of Internet IT resources is a significant issue, but so too is it an opportunity — an opportunity to re-structure IT as a business-driven function. CIO’s, IT executives, and business leaders must identify the roles and competencies that understand how information, processes, and relationships drive business effectiveness and who can lead the development of solutions to support LOB demands. These roles include business process designers and developers, enterprise architects, information modelers, business analysts, and IT financial analysts.  While there is not an overabundance of these resources either, an IT group organized around these roles will require fewer bodies which equates to less operational overhead.  The effect of such a transition however will leave a gap in the more traditional IT roles such as application development, programming, infrastructure and services.

“In China, India and other countries, the IT curriculum attracts enrollment.  Chinese universities graduate about 500,000 IT and high-tech students every year.”  Developing countries such as China and others are quickly becoming part of the workforce solution, but as it relates to Internet-oriented technologies such as Java, .NET, XML and others. Thus, it comes back to application modernization.  There is a tremendous demand among business leaders that IT become business driven.  This requires that IT resources are more business-minded, but such a transition in resource skill set requires growing the IT department and incurring more costs, or focusing the IT organization on these skills and leveraging outsourced resources for development and programming.  To adopt that outsource model effectively however requires that applications and the architecture that supports them exist in a format familiar to that pool of outsource
resources.

Pursuance of an application modernization initiative, regardless of size or scope, is paramount to better utilization of offshore resources.

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