When you hear the word “Sustainability” what comes to mind?
The word “sustainability” produces images of windmills, solar farms, and electric cars humming along for most people. Sustainability is a key element of planning strategies to match expected futures. Current events have trivialized “Sustainability” in everyday language. This narrow usage now makes it too easy to dismiss sustainability when planning strategies. We think it worthwhile to reclaim sustainability within enterprise business architecture and IT systems’ planning.
Sustainability, applied to strategy planning, is the ability to continue an activity or maintain a capability for an indeterminate amount of time. Changes in society, weather, regulation, public sentiment, business trends complicate long-term sustainability.
Legacy systems from 20 or 30 (or more!) years ago inhabit the back rooms of many enterprises. No enterprise wants to pay to completely replace or recode them. Yet, they were built in a different world. The regulatory reporting, customer, technical data held in these old legacy systems can be invaluable. Besides money the know-how and process knowledge may have been lost as people grow up or old. Tradeoffs must be made between maintaining legacy applications, migrating their data, or just junking them and starting over.
Sustainability is an evergreen problem. That shiny new enterprise system (e.g., ERP, database, AI subsystem, etc.) will be a legacy system 20 years from now.
Let’s bring Sustainability back as a term to frame actions that minimize risk and cost in large enterprise systems.
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