Silicon.com: Old apps, Gartner says, could be problem
Silicon.com reports that analyst Scott Nelson at Gartner warned against IT “train wrecks” caused by spending money on short-term fixes designed to keep older applications – including applications no longer supported by vendors – running while not looking at a broader IT strategy.
As tech ages, its ability to support business changes lessens as new applications are less likely to be compatible with old ones. Another feature of aging tech is that it becomes further removed from the IT team’s future vision – making that harder to achieve. This also means information becomes harder to access and analyze as the tech gets older – a particular problem for businesses heavily dependent on data.
I see what Nelson is saying, and the environment of the modern enterprise is very different from the environment of that – well, still modern enterprise… 2006 isn’t that far off, but, like, modern two years ago enterprise. For example, apps designed to work on a LAN often have too many transmissions to work on a WAN. There are also other problems; heck, if you want to know the problems of legacy software, try running some old DOS games on your Windows NT dual-core gaming rig today.
(I still miss you, Wing Commander II.)
Steve Gillmor: Why IT should listen to Palin
Whatever your political preferences, Sarah Palin’s performance in the Vice Presidential debate can be seen as a blueprint for how IT must learn to respond to the social media wave.
That’s why IT needs to look carefully at Sarah Palin’s strategy in the debate, where she simply dropped the pretense of playing ball and told Biden, the media, and most directly the 50 million viewers that she wasn’t going to worry about the format or the rules or what the event sought to project as its rationale, but rather talk directly without filtering to her audience…. But what it mirrors with the dialogue with IT is that she was saying what social media users are saying, namely, we’re gonna use this stuff no matter what you think about it.
Steve, you needed 793 words to tell IT departments that people will use blogs, YouTube, and Facebook at work and that they should take advantage of this rather than try to shut it down at the network level?
Now, every blogger facing a deadline will often take a news hook and hammer it into something remotely resembling something tangentially related to the topic of the blog… but this? This is a stretch.
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