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Government United States IT Technology

How the FCC CIO Plans To Modernize 207 Legacy IT Systems 74

Posted by samzenpus from the good-luck-with-that dept.
Lemeowski writes in with this interview of FCC CIO David Bray. "When David Bray took over as CIO of the FCC last year, he found the agency saddled with 207 legacy systems, which is about one system for every eight employees in the 1,750-person agency. Bray, who is one of the youngest CIOs across the federal government, shares his plan for updating those systems to a cloud-based, common data platform, that's "ideally open source." In this interview, Bray shares the challenges the FCC faces as it upgrades its systems, including keeping up morale and finding a way to fit longtime employees into his modernization strategy."
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How the FCC CIO Plans To Modernize 207 Legacy IT Systems More

How the FCC CIO Plans To Modernize 207 Legacy IT Systems

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  • Nice idea... I wish he could teach it to some of the politicians up there.

  • Good For Him (Score:3)

    by rgbscan ( 321794 ) on Monday December 01, 2014 @12:29PM (#48498773) Homepage

    Good for him, he hit all the buzzword checkboxes. K street will have a lobbying job lined up for him when he's ready to golden parachute out of there.

    • Re:Good For Him (Score:5, Insightful)

      by plopez ( 54068 ) on Monday December 01, 2014 @12:42PM (#48498921) Journal

      Youth is not a real asset here. He is going to destroy systems with years of business logic in them and try to replace all that work in a short period of time. Good luck with that.

      Just another half bright kid who doesn't know what he has just proposed.

      • Re:Good For Him (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Monday December 01, 2014 @12:54PM (#48499041) Homepage

        Yeah, my thinking when someone talks about modernizing legacy systems is usually ... "Have you ever actually been on a project to do this?"

        In my personal experience, the older the legacy system, and the more embedded it is in your business ... the harder it is to replace.

        I've been on a few projects trying to replace 25-40 year old computer systems. And pretty much all of them have been epic failures because people woefully underestimate how much work is involved, and don't fully appreciate all of the things they haven't considered until it's so far into the process to be too late to fix.

        It's an admirable goal. but usually proves far more complex than the people championing it realize.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dkf ( 304284 )

          In my personal experience, the older the legacy system, and the more embedded it is in your business ... the harder it is to replace.

          But if it's that old, it's probably also massively underdocumented (if at all) and so if something unexpected happens, your ass is still hanging out the window. Producing the documentation of what was actually done is at least as valuable a part of a replacement project as the change to the new system, as it should allow someone to start looking at which parts are required, which parts are emulating interfaces (from both sides, usually) that could be de-layered for improved performance and capabilities with

          • I am not disagreeing that maintaining the legacy system can be very expensive and a losing battle,

            But, I've seen projects which run on for several years, and at ever increasing cost ... and sooner or later someone has to decide if they keep going or scrap it.

            I've seen about 5-6 such projects get completely scrapped due to costs.

            Because, and I have witnessed this several times ... the initial team guiding the project has the advice of someone who believes his pet technology can solve any problem. And the fu

            • this is a post of wisdom and experience to be sure.

            • Sigh been there done that, could not agree with you more. A simple scenario to help illustrate your point. We had an old server, started acting up OS wise as well as hardware, so we migrated all our stuff off and switch off the server (luckily we kept it in place, just switched it off). A week later we get a call from across the country. "Please switch the server on again, we're not getting our feeds". Switch the server back on and go looking for the code, find some horribly convoluted COM libraries do

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Matheus ( 586080 )

            You are severely underestimating an organization's ability to apply band-aids when needed.

            I'm in the middle (well towards then end) of just such a legacy replacement project. I can, without any hesitation, say this project is a success but the head aches we've dealt with are pretty severe and it took a great, well managed team, a solid couple years to get to a 95% point. The problem with legacy systems is not necessarily the errors in the code (of which there are plenty... can we say type UN-safe language

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jbolden ( 176878 )

              I think it does. He wants to break the application infrastructure into microservices.

              That works pretty well with legacy code. For example you have a COBOL routine which used to go through the tape and extract all the records meeting criteria X to another tape which then gets fed... This has been updated over the years to do a file copies and trigger jobs as well as making criteria X more complex. Well you pull the criteria out and then it can run against a data lake equally well... So the issue is not

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tnk1 ( 899206 )

            The major problem is that fixing certain ingrained problems requires a certain amount of time and preparation to execute on properly. Many executives want results "now" so they can show value. That is what really needs to change, but unless we can somehow change that "immediate fix" mindset, it's going to continue to be fits and starts.

            Of course, in their defense, sometimes the only way to deal with a persistent problem is to get out the machete and start whacking. You will lose some value, but you may e

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by dagarath ( 33684 )

          The problem is with 207 'legacy systems'.. that's going to mean there's a few systems that every employee uses.. time clock, HR, email, intranet, etc. Then there's 200 systems that 5-20 people use. Probably tracking systems within each department. So, numerous small focused systems are going to be merged into 1 gargantuan do-it-all system. Nothing ever goes wrong with these plans....

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbolden ( 176878 )

            Why merge for a cloud system? You create microservices for each one of these that other applications can use. You don't use a common application. This guy is advocating against monolithic applications by arguing for a rich service architecture.

        • I once worked for a state government I.T. unit. There was an ancient Compaq Proliant server that was out NT Domain server. We wouldn't touch that box if you paid us. New I.T. director comes in and decides to put in a new domain cluster. We warned him - both we systems guys left the place before that went off. I hear from people inside that it went horribly. Group policies, memberships etc. were a cluster fuck etc. Spent many nights and weekends getting it all ironed out.

          We systems guys did get out way on

      • Youth is not a real asset here. He is going to destroy systems with years of business logic in them and try to replace all that work in a short period of time. Good luck with that.

        Just another half bright kid who doesn't know what he has just proposed.

        Yikes. Proof that Ageism goes both ways.

        • Yikes. Proof that Ageism goes both ways.

          Yeah, but the old guys have many years more anecdotal evidence showing they are right. :)

          • That may be, but how much of that is because the young guys don't get the chance to show they *can* be right?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by plopez ( 54068 )

          No experience. I have gone down this road several times. It always takes longer, costs more, and is much more painful than imagined. The problems are less technical than understanding the business rules, laws, regulatons, special cases, and interactions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tiberus ( 258517 )

        Gotta give him thumbs up for enthusiasm. One can always hope, he has a few BOFH advisers to scope the project and give it a reality check. I get the concerns about the scale of this type of project but, I do occasionally wish someone would force us to get rid of a couple legacy systems I have to deal with and am forced to find creative and often insecure ways to keep them up and running.

        Granted "cloud-based" gives me the heebee jeebees. Whose cloud?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          The Federal Government has several FISMA approved clouds. Plus many agencies run private clouds. So Oracle's, Lockheed Martin's, Verizon Federal...

      • Youth is not a real asset here. He is going to destroy systems with years of business logic in them and try to replace all that work in a short period of time. Good luck with that.

        Just another half bright kid who doesn't know what he has just proposed.

        He never mentioned he was in a hurry. My bet is, they have a few ceremonial migrations per FY to justify the project cost, and in just 20 or 30 years their old ineffective legacy systems will be replaced by a single new ineffective legacy system.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by adamrut ( 799143 )

          He never mentioned he was in a hurry. My bet is, they have a few ceremonial migrations per FY to justify the project cost, and in just 20 or 30 years their old ineffective legacy systems will be replaced by a single new ineffective legacy system.

          "The longer-term, 24-month plan will then include the ‘shift’ of data to the cloud-based, common data platform and the rewrite of legacy systems as processes on that platform."

          I think I like your timeframe better...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by plopez ( 54068 )

          I do think he is an appointee. In two years or less he will be gone. If a Republcan wins the Whitehouse there *will* be a change of leadership. If The Dems win the new President will probably appoint a replacement. He has two years.

      • Geez, who introduced a urine-based liquid into your corn-derived breakfast cereal?

      • namely, outsourcing all the equipment and control. make no mistake, OctopusCo doesn't suffer joy in the cubes, and doesn't care a damn about whether the work gets done. all they care about is the gaps in the contract. the way I'd look at this is, ramp up the cloud replacement, work in parallel for a while, and when it's proven, come in one night and pull the big switch on all the rusty old big iron.

  • Good luck there! How about offering them a "modern" early retirement/buyout package.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      And then spend huge amounts of time training replacements? Nice idea there. You should go into politics...

  • To the cloud (Score:3)

    by jacobsm ( 661831 ) on Monday December 01, 2014 @01:07PM (#48499191)

    By moving everything to the cloud you're not eliminating problems, just making them someone elses problem, and enabling new ones to crop up.

    Be careful of what you ask for, you might just get it.

    • Well he's pushing for Open Source and TFA is light on details about whose cloud so perhaps he wants to migrate to an in house cloud? Still their problem but centralized a way that various departments can talk to each other easier where as now they can't because of disparate legacy systems.

      I do agree with some previous posters about the scope of this project but I don't automatically reject the idea just because of the heavy use of buzz words (like "cloud")...

    • By moving everything to the cloud you're not eliminating problems, just making them someone elses problem, and enabling new ones to crop up.

      He's taking 207 individual problems and making them 1 problem.
      More importantly, he's taking 207 databases and putting them in 1 place, which significantly reduces the impediments to data sharing.

      There are still government offices that have to print something from one system and input it by hand into a second.
      Whatever we can do to get rid of that type of friction is a good thing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jacobsm ( 661831 )

        By moving everything to the cloud you're not eliminating problems, just making them someone elses problem, and enabling new ones to crop up.

        He's taking 207 individual problems and making them 1 problem.
        More importantly, he's taking 207 databases and putting them in 1 place, which significantly reduces the impediments to data sharing.

        There are still government offices that have to print something from one system and input it by hand into a second.
        Whatever we can do to get rid of that type of friction is a good thing.

        Who says they're problems? Him?

        Never ask the barber if you need a haircut.

    • This is really just a way for the FCC to privatize their IT department without the liberals even noticing.

  • After it's a year overdue and 200% overbudget and everybody is completely blindsided by the fact that you can't quickly and trivially reimplement mature software systems, we'll hear a different take on this story. Of course, we get to pay for all this. *sigh*

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      He'll be screwing up some other agency before the cost details get exposed. Maybe he'll have learned what the cloud actually is at some point, though. Doubtful. But maybe.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      It's the software circle of life. The old team leaves and the new team comes in, looks at the software and says "Oh my god this is a giant turd! It must be replaced!" Well funny thing about that, usually a turd in the hand is worth two in the bush. Try not to think about that statement too hard. Anyway, my point being, the lucky ones get shot down by management immediately. The less lucky ones promise a shiny new future, end up mired in requirements and are quietly put down after a couple of years. The REA

  • I can apply buzzwords and promote synergies by empowering individuals to maximize their unique contributions. My team even volunteered overtime during the holiday season, because they were so positive about our project. It wasn't because they were afraid they would be pushed out of their jobs by a CIO whose eager to ship everything he can out of house.

    I guess he did okay at the CDC and hey, if it saves money, great, but who cares. Just do your job already. I'm sure the pay scale isn't that bad and the benef

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • "Over time, this will allow us to turn off the 207 different legacy systems, and give us one common data platform that maybe has 207 different processes interoperating at the data layer on that platform. "

    One process per system? Has this guy even worked in IT before?

    Queue excuses along the lines of, "We vastly underestimated the size and complexity of the individual systems." in 3, 2, 1....

  • At least he has some app dev experience. Even it was developing a GUI....

    https://www.linkedin.com/profi... [linkedin.com]

  • "Legacy" means it is old, but does it works? One of IT golden rule apply here: "If it's not broken, don't fix it"

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