Legacy Systems, Legacy Workforce

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.