Shining a Light on Maintenance by Mary Pratt in Computerworld highlighted some of the problems in IT maintenance, in particular costs and management of budgets. There was a lot of good material in the article including this great quote:
He thinks that companies have been ignoring the maintenance mess as they have focused on promising technologies. That's one reason why many are spending 75% or more of their IT budgets on maintenance, Murphy says. "Now we have to pay the piper," he adds
So if this is the scale of the problem, what can be done to address this? Well one option is to use business rules as you build or update new systems. This approach helps eliminate many of the typical maintenance projects by empowering business users to make their own changes in the systems. There's more on this in the business rules section of the blog as well as in the legacy modernization section. If you are new to business rules, check out the FAQ.
