In with the New; Out with the Old — How to decommission legacy IT systems

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old” ― Peter F. Drucker We know intuitively on-boarding new services without off-boarding old services is unsustainable. But decommissioning old services is... [ view full abstract ]

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
― Peter F. Drucker

We know intuitively on-boarding new services without off-boarding old services is unsustainable. But decommissioning old services is often put off. It’s not sexy. It’s a dissatisfier for users. It often requires “high-touch.”

Challenges

This paper identifies the challenges in retiring IT systems, including:
• Subset of customers will be very resistant to change
• Pushback: why is IT changing something that is working?
• Reluctance to interfere with faculty, labour relations, etc.

Role of technology

This paper emphasizes the importance of change management to retire old services, to create headroom for new technology/advanced research computing services.

What were your key learnings, research outcome(s), and/or method(s)?
• Recognize technical and political aspects to turning off an old service;
• Determine if new users are still being added to the old service, and stop, if doing so.
• Determine what the alternative for users is
• Create documentation to specifically to address transitioning from the old service to the new service
• Automate the transition, if possible
• Involve the users' support structure — they can actively work against the decommissioning

Takeaways

This paper provides a checklist to allow efficiently and effectively decommissioning legacy IT services.

Success stories

This paper draws examples from decommissioning legacy email systems

Other

Turning off old services is under-resourced and often poorly executed. We need to do a better job; if we are to be successful in deploying new services.