Worldline CTO says in a world of permanent legacy, your workforce is your biggest asset

Ryan Bryers of Worldline knows that all systems eventually age out, but the important ones need to be supported for years or decades

Retraining should be preferred over hire and fire when looking for new IT, Worldline CTO Ryan Bryers told us last month. But what do you do when you employ people who cannot or will not be retrained? It's not always a problem, he said.

"There are things in the business that are legacy, and they're doing well, and at the moment the clients don't really want them to change: there are still clients out there who want very stable, trusted systems...because their function requirement hasn't changed and they're not bothered about being able to change fast…

"There's always going to be legacy. I think a lot of people have this view of, ‘We'll get rid of the legacy and then we'll be purely digital'...[but] look at delivering a B2B mobile solution: you're responsible for giving them the handset, the app, the monitoring and so on. Well, actually the question is ‘How long will you keep the handset for?'… The thing is, that device is legacy after 18 months.

"You've got to change your thinking. Even the app itself: think about the evolution of Java for Android and Objective-C for iOS; now it's Swift. Those languages change. You could have developed something in Objective-C three years ago, and now if it's not in Swift it's not compatible. You have to keep recrafting things constantly, and I think that those cycles are going to get tighter."

If legacy will always exist, then people who are trained in those systems will always be necessary. You might not require the full complement of staff when migrating from Hadoop to Spark, but a few specialists to keep the lights on will protect you against failure and data loss.

Bryers said that there are going to be people who struggle with retraining, and so it makes sense to retain them to run critical legacy systems:

"You could give a group of people, who've maybe been developing in VB [Visual Basic] or .NET for 20 or 30 years - give them Confluence, give them Jenkins, give them SonarQube, give them the desire to use QA tests and Github. Just watch them melt down...

"There are always some [people] who say, ‘I've been .NET for 25 years, I love .NET, I know it inside out, I'm not ready to learn something else'. That's actually fine for me: we know that we've got a whole bunch of systems that are probably going to stay in legacy for another 10 years. There's no issue right now…

"Can I subscribe to the fire and hire? Given our three-speed approach right now I would say not, because I still think that there's a place in each of the three speeds. At some point you'll get to a point where your legacy changes. If I've still got a bunch of people who still do VB… If you migrate that to a newer language, and those people suddenly have no skills, you've got the retrain or release problem."

Wordline's three-speed approach to IT is an evolution of the two-speed mode of transitioning between legacy and digital, with the addition of ‘Bridging Speed' that crosses the gap between the two. We'll explore it more in a later article.