Negative legacy

A thought has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks, and a check on Dictionary.com last night seemed to validate it (I’m not sure that that is a rigorous scientific method, but heck, this is 2012). The IT Industry, it seems, is the only place where the term “legacy” is used in a negative way.

In most uses, a “legacy” is something that someone, or a group of people, build to leave to future generations, and is something to be proud of. Even a chap with significance in the history of my current employer, one Bill Gates, seems to be building an incredible legacy with the foundation that he has established with his wife.

But when it comes to software, legacy is generally seen as bad. It’s what holds us back. It’s what needs to be changed.

The big paradox, however, is that many in the IT industry are quite averse to change. In fact, there is an entire professional discipline within the industry that is there to help manage and regulate change (that of Change Management in a Service Management context). Some of our market insight research seems to have indicated that people working in IT are more averse to change than the general man or woman on the street (quite what the unit measurement is of “change averseness” I don’t know… you may want to treat this as a MadeUpStat (TM)).

This averseness to change, and the lack of control over change, I feel is one of the biggest barriers that traditional IT faces when faced with the twin forces of consumerisation and commoditisation of IT. Software that auto updates without any change control, for example, flies into the face of the accepted wisdom of years of IT management thinking. But if the choices about purchasing become increasingly decentralized away from the IT department, IT management thinking might be the thing that needs to change.

I’ve been watching with interest the number of releases that Instagram have been making with minor bug fixes over the past few weeks since their launch on the Android platform. It’s a great product, but my hunch is that they don’t run a traditional IT change management model in their operations. But how many projects that have been run on those traditional principals could be said to have achieved similar levels of success in such a short period of time?