The case for retiring old software (and software developers)

That 60 per cent of big companies in the US and Europe believe they currently support far more applications than are actually required to run their business may not be surprising – the higher up the management ladder CIOs and IT directors travel, the more they can lose track of which bits of software are mission-critical and which are not.

But with all the pressures on IT departments to store growing volumes of information, the 61 per cent or executives who admit to keeping data from legacy applications beyond its expiration date "just in case" points to a much broader inefficiency.

It also suggests many waste time and money keeping on software and specialist staff while having little or no motivation to tackle the problem.

These were the findings of the Annual Landscape report, researched and published jointly by global consultancy giant Capgemini and HP earlier this month, which based its conclusions on in-depth interviews with 100 CIOs and IT managers in companies employing anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 employees.

Murat Aksu, global HP software alliance lead for Capgemini and the author of the report, says that too many companies fail to implement systematic application retirement and data migration programmes, often because applications are simply not considered a key priority.

"The problem has been around for some time, but has accelerated since the economic crisis, especially for the financial sector," said Aksu.

"Some companies have up to 10,000 applications, and there are banks in the US I have visited that had more than 80,000 – though only 30,000 are mission-critical. How do you support 80,000 applications and how much does that cost?"

Though both Capgemini and HP are almost certainly interested in selling companies the consultancy services to help them migrate data and clear out any unwanted applications from their inventory, there is no denying that many organisations do suffer from this type of problem to some degree: the big question is whether they think it is worth doing anything about it.

Lack of money is one barrier to change, as is the absence of any clear return on investment – the cost of application retirement is usually unknown (often because CIOs rarely know how many applications are actually still running in the first place) so associated initiatives are hard to monetise.

But for some, a reluctance to scrap old software goes way beyond any inherent inability to learn new tricks, says Aksu: keeping applications alive beyond their sell-by date is often a way for workers to ensure their continued usefulness to the organisation as a whole.