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Marcus Ryu, VP, Strategy and New Products,  Guidewire Software (San Mateo, Calif.)
Marcus Ryu, VP, Strategy and New Products, Guidewire Software (San Mateo, Calif.)
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Legacy Systems, Legacy Workforce

Aging is the trend that should concern insurance CIOs most.

Aging is the trend that should concern insurance CIOs most. Unlike new forms of agent interaction or the ever-tantalizing prospect of Internet distribution, human beings age at a completely predictable pace: every year the IT staff who maintains your core legacy systems gets one year closer to retirement. This reflects the 15- to 30-year age of those systems and the evolving shape of the IT workforce. Legacy systems are poorly documented and lack vendor support. Less than 5 percent of computer science programs teach COBOL or mainframe technology. Consequently, many carriers rely on the arcane and proprietary knowledge of a small core of system experts less than a decade from retirement.

This entails an industrywide imperative: to develop strategic road maps to legacy replacement -- not front-end interfaces, but complete replacement. It's a multiyear, multiphase journey, but the long-term benefits of legacy replacement are immense -- and the consequence of no strategy at all is disaster.

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