Maintenance Dollars at Work

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July 16, 2001 (Computerworld) -- Most executives say their businesses are changing faster than their IT organizations can keep critical systems current. Yet IT can't afford to make any major changes because so much of the technology budget is devoted to incremental maintenance.

The frustration is most acute at Fortune 1,000 companies. A recent Crossroads-OSA poll of 200 executives showed that only about 3% of their companies' programmers are assigned to new systems development. Almost 52% are devoted to software maintenance. Just over 45% are dedicated to interface development and maintenance.

Businesspeople know something is wrong but find it hard to hold their own when discussing technical resource allocation. One solution is for Fortune 1,000 firms to adopt the approach of independent software vendors, whose ratio of new development to maintenance work is about 1-to-1, compared with a Fortune 1,000 ratio of 1-to-17.

Why the huge difference? Are software vendors exempt from maintaining their applications? Hardly. Rather, they do much of the maintenance as the applications are built.

Disciplined by the competitive market, software vendors build applications with staying power. This means designing applications that make more frequent and disciplined use of standards and shared components. This keeps the interaction among program components more uniform and better documented for fewer maintenance-induced errors. Moreover, software vendors look at maintenance as an opportunity to periodically go the extra mile and rewrite modules to keep the architecture fresh and flexible.

Fortune 1,000 technology firms should borrow this page from the software vendors' playbook. By creating and maintaining applications with flexibility as a goal, and spending more effort reeling in spaghetti code, the Fortune 1,000 can make the same dollars work twice.

But this advice isn't a panacea for all large companies. In industries such as financial services, corporations typically regard in-house development as an important ongoing responsibility. But in manufacturing, purchased applications, services and software components are combined with legacy systems. Application development has a limited role, and thus maintenance is dwindling. This leaves the development and maintenance of interfaces as the primary focus.

To succeed, businesses must automate interface development and maintenance. The financial returns are as dramatic as when manufacturing moved to the assembly line. Companies can reduce the cost of keeping line-of-business applications current. Interface maintenance that used to take months to develop and test can be done in an afternoon simply by changing parameters. Such an improvement is an opportunity to gain competitive advantage. roi

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