Many of you will know Dale Vecchio, Gartner's long time commentator on IT modernization. Well, for MF Live, he has produced a couple of presentations for us and I wanted to draw your attention to some of his comments from the second of these, where Dale is considering the options available to companies for modernizing their IT, and the benefits they should expect.

At the outset, Dale highlights the need for companies to get a better understanding of their applications, and has the following to say...

"Nowadays, you can find productivity tools for developing COBOL applications that are as productive as any we’ve seen. The ability to understand your application inventory, to create sort of a ‘bill of materials’ structure that helps you see the relationships between programs, between programs and screens, or programs and files, to be able to see how data flows throughout your application, those are readily available from a number of organizations, certainly including Micro Focus, that help you do more with less. Organizations have been somewhat reluctant to spend money on these technologies and I don’t understand why. You would expect a 30% – 40% productivity improvement just through the use of these tools. Any organization that’s going to continue to manage its portfolio on their existing infrastructure over the next 5 years is crazy not to evaluate these tools. The ability to implement changes, to understand the impact of that change, to reduce the risk of failure, to reduce downtime, to prove the quality of those applications, goes up tremendously when you leverage these tools."

Take a look at the video, and you'll hear Dale talking about many other strategies for cost saving and productivity gains, not to mention managing skills, and improving business alignment.

And feel free to post your comments afterwards...

Julian