Who will take on PLM legacy data?

Legacy data it painful. Speak to anybody in the business of PDM/PLM implementation and they will tell you that importing existing (aka legacy) data is complicated, time consuming and after all very expensive task. It can easy cut your implementation profits and to increase project time. In past, I was blogging about legacy data problem, different types of legacy data and main options to solve the problem. Navigate to this link to refresh your memories.

However, legacy data problem is much bigger than PDM/PLM only. ZDNet article –  Business intelligence, tackling legacy systems top priorities for CIO. The article speaks about the fact “legacy data problem” is climbing up to the top CIO priorities these days. For them, legacy data is the information stuffed in file cabinets and Excel spreadsheets or buried in antique data management systems company built and/or acquired for the last two decades. These systems are sitting in corp data centers or (sometimes) under the desks of employees. I found the following passage interesting:

Business intelligence projects are the top priority for government CIOs this year, followed by plans to strip out legacy systems. According to analyst Gartner, government IT organizations are expecting their budgets to have a modest compound growth rate of 1.3 percent through to the end of 2017, with increased spending on IT services, software and datacentres likely to be fuelled cuts in internal technology services, devices and telecoms services.

Manufacturing companies are interesting outfits when it come to legacy data problem. The years of CAD/PDM/PLM implementations, heavy customization and product modernization created a unique system zoo. To maintain these system is a very expensive task. To make changes in existing implementations is complicated. It slows business and blows up IT budgets. This is where “strip out legacy system” becomes a priority for IT.

What is my conclusion? The traditional PDM/PLM (and not only) business practices is to come with new solution and try to ignore the existence of legacy data. Very often it becomes a problem of customers and (for the best) implementers and service providers. My hunch is that companies and products showing value prop around legacy data can get some traction in CIOs corner offices. Systems that able to handle legacy data can have a competitive advantages these days. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg