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How the FCC CIO Plans To Modernize 207 Legacy IT Systems
Lemeowski writes in with this interview of FCC CIO David Bray. "When David Bray took over as CIO of the FCC last year, he found the agency saddled with 207 legacy systems, which is about one system for every eight employees in the 1,750-person agency. Bray, who is one of the youngest CIOs across the federal government, shares his plan for updating those systems to a cloud-based, common data platform, that's "ideally open source." In this interview, Bray shares the challenges the FCC faces as it upgrades its systems, including keeping up morale and finding a way to fit longtime employees into his modernization strategy."
Nice idea... I wish he could teach it to some of the politicians up there.
Good for him, he hit all the buzzword checkboxes. K street will have a lobbying job lined up for him when he's ready to golden parachute out of there.
Good luck there! How about offering them a "modern" early retirement/buyout package.
We tried that in the 1800's. It didn't work. For all of its flaws the civil service program works better.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Maybe, but the legacy systems administrators are just high-tech janitors.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
By moving everything to the cloud you're not eliminating problems, just making them someone elses problem, and enabling new ones to crop up.
Be careful of what you ask for, you might just get it.
Yikes. Proof that Ageism goes both ways.
'far too much influence'
You have an objective measure of this value?
Please share.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
After it's a year overdue and 200% overbudget and everybody is completely blindsided by the fact that you can't quickly and trivially reimplement mature software systems, we'll hear a different take on this story. Of course, we get to pay for all this. *sigh*
Where I work, we use a Wang system based on a Honeywell system to store and manage images. It's still state of the art, was when it was introduced, and is living on in emulated hardware that does, in fact, work very very well. Downtime is measured in single digit minutes per year.
It certainly meets the common definition of 'legacy'
People use 'legacy' to describe 'obsolete', 'expensive', or 'not new'. Wrongly in many cases.
Alas, it is popular to replace 'legacy' systems with new ones that the newer teams understand better and are more comfortable fixing. Note I did not say just 'understand'. Nor did I claim that these are 'better'. Just more comfortable.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
No government agency should have longtime employees. It's supposed to be a service, not a career.. It's these oldtimers that are making all the problems we endure. The bureaucrats are the "secret government".. We must purge them completely every few years.
So right about the time people start getting good at their jobs we should fire them all? If your goal is to ensure that the old stereotype of government being incompetent at everything gets reinforced, then that is a great idea. If you value things like, you know, competence, this sounds like a horrible waste of my tax dollars. And in many cases I trust the bureaucrat to do a better job than the politician who has honed everything to a 10 second sound bite without any real substance behind their ideas. At least the bureaucrats have skin in the game, in that they have to implement the policies.
namely, outsourcing all the equipment and control. make no mistake, OctopusCo doesn't suffer joy in the cubes, and doesn't care a damn about whether the work gets done. all they care about is the gaps in the contract. the way I'd look at this is, ramp up the cloud replacement, work in parallel for a while, and when it's proven, come in one night and pull the big switch on all the rusty old big iron.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I recall when I worked for the Attorney General's office in RI we had an old Wang VS 100 system running a few databases. Stuff that could easily be ported out to MS-SQL and Access. It was like pulling teeth but not from who you'd expect. It was the person on my staff that managed those databases. Finally put my foot down and said here's the date we transition and here's the date we de-commission the VS 100.
And it got done. She hated me for that. But hey, it's not my job to coddle. If I piss on your corn flakes there's a damned good reason for it.
He'll be screwing up some other agency before the cost details get exposed. Maybe he'll have learned what the cloud actually is at some point, though. Doubtful. But maybe.
I can apply buzzwords and promote synergies by empowering individuals to maximize their unique contributions. My team even volunteered overtime during the holiday season, because they were so positive about our project. It wasn't because they were afraid they would be pushed out of their jobs by a CIO whose eager to ship everything he can out of house.
I guess he did okay at the CDC and hey, if it saves money, great, but who cares. Just do your job already. I'm sure the pay scale isn't that bad and the benefits are pretty awesome.
What's secret about the bureaucrats? They aren't a secret government they are the government. They handle micropolicy while the public debates macro policy. Do you want to have 20k public debates about water quality levels for each of the 20k lakes or one overall policy about water quality that then gets applied?
Legacy systems have a few pros and cons, the ideal response is to evaluate the cost/benefit review, and availability for changes
Issues to evaluate
- Is this a specialized 3rd party product/hardware (may be restricted to vendor eg. ATM's were for a long time OS/2 well after IBM ceased producing OS/2).
- If it is 3rd party, do they still exist, or is there a similar product available.
- Is there specialized hardware requirements. (you may have no problem with a video card, but you might have a problem finding hardware for Wind tunnel Data collection)
- Has the amount of data processing increased/decreased.
- Is the service being utilized less and less.
- Do you have the manpower to handle the existing infrastructure for the proposed life expectancy of the product (if there are 3 people in the world that knows the system, and they all disappear, you may have a problem maintaining the system.
- Will a prolonged outage caused by system being unavailable due to the age, cause a serious impact.
- Is there a good justification that the changes will out weight the current value.
Pros
- business logic have been captured, and generated
- system has been optimized for the task
- known output
Cons
- Skilled labour, the languages, or hardware may not have limited and aging employee pools. (FORTRAN and COBOL are good examples)
- Increasing costs, technical people and/or parts become more difficult and costly to obtain. Some replacements may have to be custom made even
- Existing hardware could be slower
- Unsupportable protocols (eg SNA or Banyan Vines)
- Security, system may not have been patched for weeks, months or even years.
"Over time, this will allow us to turn off the 207 different legacy systems, and give us one common data platform that maybe has 207 different processes interoperating at the data layer on that platform. "
One process per system? Has this guy even worked in IT before?
Queue excuses along the lines of, "We vastly underestimated the size and complexity of the individual systems." in 3, 2, 1....
At least he has some app dev experience. Even it was developing a GUI....
https://www.linkedin.com/profi...
It's the software circle of life. The old team leaves and the new team comes in, looks at the software and says "Oh my god this is a giant turd! It must be replaced!" Well funny thing about that, usually a turd in the hand is worth two in the bush. Try not to think about that statement too hard. Anyway, my point being, the lucky ones get shot down by management immediately. The less lucky ones promise a shiny new future, end up mired in requirements and are quietly put down after a couple of years. The REALLY unlucky ones deliver completed software which doesn't offer as many features as the old software and has a ton of bugs the old software fixed over the course of two or three decades. By the time they get all those bugs fixed and features added, their software has morphed into a giant turd that must be replaced.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We must purge them completely every few years.
and replace them with corporate types like Wheeler! yes, regulatory capture at its finest.
mfwright@batnet.com
"Legacy" means it is old, but does it works? One of IT golden rule apply here: "If it's not broken, don't fix it"
Oh my god! A fond memory of the old days! Where's Tub Girl! Where's a Beowulf cluster of those!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
For starters, the US government is the biggest user of ColdFusion, but at least that's still supported even if it's a commercial product.