Inspired by Robert Pirsig’s book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Airlines use a specific approach to aircraft maintenance that can serve as a blueprint for legacy application management and budgeting.
In this article, I explain why Pirsig’s book is relevant to this business and what links it to legacy information technology (IT) systems. To do so, I will discuss several topics, including innovation, order and chaos, and the current AI wave.
But most importantly, I will talk about people. At its core, Pirsig’s book is about two things: the quality of craftsmanship and why people find dealing with technology difficult.
Principles of Prevention and Refurbishment
From reading Pirsig’s book, I learned that commercial aircraft maintenance is based on the principles of prevention and refurbishment. During routine maintenance, aircraft parts are replaced according to a fixed schedule, regardless of their condition, to ensure they do not fail.
In the refurbishment process, airlines can quickly introduce new, innovative technology to avoid technology debt. This helps make the original investment far more profitable than buying a whole new aircraft despite increasing maintenance costs.
A case in point is the decades-long use of McDonnell Douglas DC4s in Southern Africa, long after these aircraft were removed from service elsewhere. I realized that airlines used a highly sophisticated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process before it became relevant in the IT industry.
The same principles should apply in the context of maintenance and continuous modernization of business-critical legacy applications.
There’s no need to provoke an avoidable accident or system failure when viable alternatives exist. It is essential to understand why an application is fit for purpose: previously, currently, and in the future. The basics must be in place to apply required business and regulatory changes.
How Innovative is AI
IT advances have primarily been driven by mainstream requirements and less by innovation. This remains a significant impediment to innovation and the cause of ‘don’t change a running system’ tactics to justify the lack of systems investments.
“Different is not always better, but better is always different.”
However, as the hype around new AI-related ideas proves, a conservative approach to new technologies is applicable. It is essential to recognize that many technologies and processes are being defined as “AI” when, in fact, they have been around for a long time. This includes:
- solutions for predictive analysis
- robotic process automation
- industrial production automation
- supermarket shelf restocking
Marketing them as AI risks obscuring where real innovation potential exists.
Different is not always better, but better is always different. Companies benefit when they seriously take advantage of their legacy technology, people’s competence, and employee know-how instead of denying and rejecting the opportunities legacy poses. Leaving people out of the equation is not the way to a successful result.
“Companies benefit when they seriously take advantage of their legacy technology, people’s competence, and employee know-how.”
The solution lies in applying this principle to developers, users, decision-makers, and shareholders to ensure that disruptive technologies are used meaningfully.
Swarm Intelligence
AI and Machine Learning are part of the required cognitive science field relevant to human behavior. Applying Swarm Intelligence—the study of gregarious creatures’ behavior for solving complex, nonlinear problems in nature—is more relevant to what we need. With it, we can learn from joint experience and interaction with intelligent humans, their emotions, and their systems. We must return to a better appreciation of using the quality inherent in what we already have–just as in aircraft maintenance—in our people and in our systems.
There is great potential in using meaningful AI and Machine Learning algorithms and data to improve the design and maintenance of aircraft, including magic-like flight simulators.
Order and Chaos — Our Business
The IT business has existed for about 70 years. I think the best description of the general IT technology approach is “living on the edge of order and chaos.” The real question is how our industry deals with the challenge of balancing order and chaos and with the unexpected developments we encounter every day.
Unpredictability remains the constant factor we deal with and measure ourselves against. I believe dealing with unpredictability is part of our DNA and the systems we build. When dealing with unpredictability, we strive for stable solutions, but we also try to be innovative and creative. But do we really succeed?
Is it our fate to fly in under-maintained aircraft with under-maintained systems, using approaches that are not well understood but creative or innovative? No, that’s laughable. We should take a more reliable, serious, responsible, and appropriate approach to our valuable legacy systems as they develop in an increasingly complex, competitive, and volatile world.
We in the industry know from experience that adequate investment in our legacy systems adds value for all stakeholders: developers, operations, users, and business partners.
Falling In Love With COBOL
I was born in the momentous year 1959, the year COBOL—gifted to us by Grace Hopper—became available as a programming language. Twenty years after 1959, two remarkable things happened to me: I fell in love with COBOL and finally understood the meaning of Don McLean‘s legendary song, “American Pie.”
Why fall in Love with COBOL? Easy! It was in the exceptional summer of 1979, and my no-nonsense boss gave me a COBOL manual and a task to review the code of an existing program. It was my first exposure to COBOL, and I have remained in love as a true COBOLIANER.
Like any love affair, there are highlights, lowlights, crises, and unforgettable memories. A love affair needs new impulses, constant dialogue, hard work, and joint, complementary understanding, often when it’s most strenuous.
Just like it is with Legacy IT.
Why Is Legacy IT Often A Short Story?
Over the years, the radio transmission of “American Pie” – its own legacy at more than eight minutes long — has been reduced to about half its length. It became a short story, losing power and relevance.
This, as with Legacy-IT and COBOL, is at the expense of the quality of the music and the story. The relevance, value, and quality of older music and older software applications are lost by introducing limited versions.
Looking at the efforts to transform COBOL, these attempts inevitably, irreparably, and unintentionally change the business specification. Trying to convert one system base into another one for which it is not suited nor represents will fail.
Apart from ignoring the underlying sophistication of the legacy run-time level, a correct transformation simply cannot be magically achieved. Just as significantly, the organization’s DNA represented in the application code risks being lost or ignored.
Investing in People
Which brings me back to people. Platforms, Applications, Technology, and Human resources (P.A.T.H.) are the elements of legacy systems. By combining the requirements for these four aspects based on consolidated development, deployment, and operations solutions, we gain a solution for customers to reach their destinations.
When considering potential employees, our company focuses on “Attitude to Aptitude.” Our criteria are simple:
- Does their attitude suit our approach to the human resource shortages around legacy applications?
- Is it what we need to consolidate, apply best practices, and provide just-in-time skills?
We empower developers and resolve personnel shortages when they are needed.
We provide developers with what they need to be productive in legacy and newly developed systems based on advanced development environments. These match the needs and bring together the skills and know-how our customers require for older developers, current generations, and the next generation. It resolves the human resources shortage by combining the talents of experienced, current, and new staff with one approach.
We consider that people learn differently, also at different ages, and never stop learning, always appreciating the intrinsic quality and value of what they are doing—just as Pirsig tried to make us see.
Your businesses fly and stay in the air with your COBOL legacy systems because the basis is an authentic, positively disruptive, evolutionary, and successfully implemented love affair.
CEO, EasiRun Europa GmbH