Communication let me down
Fax machines
Although they didn't become widespread in Australian businesses until the 1980s, the basic technology for transmitting images over telephone lines was actually understood back in the 1840s. Once technology manufacturing techniques made fax machines affordable for most businesses, they quickly spread into companies of all sizes. In the pre-Internet era, faxes seemed like the ultimate way to communicate documents between businesses, even if you had to photocopy them for archival purposes and curse at the relative illegibility of many of them.
In a post-Internet world, of course, things are rather different. Being sent a fax these days can seem like an inconvenience compared to the flexibility of e-mail. Yet fax has stubbornly hung on in there, and continues to be used even for applications which might seem more suited to an Internet-based approach.
The explanation, again, is procedural. Businesses that rely heavily on paper documents--such as legal and financial companies--very quickly adopted faxes as part of their overall workflow. Shifting to a purely digital approach is much more complicated, and if there isn't a clear benefit to doing so, the shift simply doesn't happen. The lower archiving costs for digital documents versus paper ones are likely to tell against fax systems in the very long run, but that change could be decades in the making.
Telephony systems
On the surface, it might seem that telephony systems have changed most of all in the past decade or so. Nobody uses analogue phones any more; many people have shifted away from conventional telephony to IP-based systems, which (at least in theory) allow voice applications to be merged with all kinds of other software. And then there's mobile phones everywhere you turn.
However, while the underlying plumbing may have changed significantly, the uses to which telephones are put haven't undergone the same kinds of fundamental shift. For instance, integrators universally report that the main reason for using IP telephony systems to date has been to cut down the costs of existing calls. That doesn't mean that the people implementing those systems aren't aware that they can also be used for neat presence-based applications and the like, but no-one appears to be making the shift for that reason. As a result, the only indication many users will have when they switch to an IP system is a new handset, and once they start making calls, they'll probably forget about that too.
Backend to the future
Tape backup
Ever since the first disk drives were rolled out into businesses, doomsayers have been predicting that tape would one day give way to disk as a major backup medium. The continued collapse in storage costs on disk (which is now approaching just cents per gigabyte in large volumes) and the emergence of new technologies such as iSCSI means that this prediction continues to reappear every few years. Nonetheless, there are very few enterprises which don't rely on tape as a primary element in their backup strategy.
Tape's easy portability and relatively low cost for larger volumes have ensured it an ongoing place in the enterprise arsenal. While capacities have increased, many of the fundamental mechanisms in use have stayed more or less the same over the past two decades. What has shifted is the way in which recovery is performed. While tape was once the medium of only resort, short-term backups to disk are often now used in the event of emergencies, with tape reserved for more fundamental restores or for use in unexpected natural disasters.
The shift away from tape is happening gradually; for instance, the most recent release of Oracle's flagship database is the first that assumes by default that backups will be performed to disk rather than tape. Despite such advances, though, nobody expects tape to disappear for a long time yet.
Mainframes
Mainframes are to the IT world what tortoises are to the natural world: they've been around for a long time, they never seem to die, they're kind of ugly, and they continue to do what they were designed to do originally. Oh, and they have a weird kind of shell interface.
Even though processing power has skipped ahead in leaps and bounds, mainframes have survived several generations of IT fashion simply by performing basic processing tasks with a high level of reliability. The current trend towards server consolidation suggests that users are again warming to the notion of centralised, virtualised, highly powered applications--the very concept around which most mainframes were designed.
While no company would base its whole business strategy on new mainframe sales, those which are in active service are unlikely to disappear in the near future. It's safe to assume, for instance, that any mainframe application that it was deemed worthwhile going through the hassle and expense of updating to eliminate any millennium-related bugs is going to be with us for some time to come.
Web services
The concept of Web services--effectively miniature applications which use XML as a standard data format and allow enterprises to combine together individual tasks to match their business needs more precisely--was first promoted as a way of bringing together highly customised components from a wide variety of sources. Yet their greatest value to date has been in providing a means of integrating disparate enterprise services. This in turn can eliminate one of the biggest headaches in any enterprise: the challenge of integration. (Analysts often estimate that integration accounts for 40 percent or more of the typical IT budget.)
While Web services have enormous potential in providing means of linking together disparate applications--some of which may be senior citizens in IT terms--the process isn't an automatic one. Most applications will require at least some modification in order to provide output which can be used by other Web services. Newer releases of most core enterprise applications often have Web services adaptors built in, but if you are working with older systems you may need specialised help. On the upside, once those adaptors are in place, you may be able to minimise maintenance on those core applications.
Making solid long-term use of existing technologies makes good business sense, since it can reduce your overall IT spend, or leave you with extra dollars for innovations that can help differentiate you from competitors.
Think value, not vintage. The notion that technology needs to deliver real business value is a familiar one, but is very relevant in this context. If a system is offering real value, don't ditch it simply because of its age.
Make sure there's a support chain. No matter how effective technology is, you need to be able to fix it when it breaks down. If there's no-one left who can offer service and support, it may be time to move on.
Get good documentation. On a related note, make sure that the procedures associated with any technology, new or old, are thoroughly documented, so that you're not reliant on the knowledge of a single individual. This is especially important with custom developed system.
Integrate with other processes. As long as existing technologies can work effectively with new ones, there's no reason to ditch them. If a single system is hampering efforts to streamline, then you may need to think again.
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