12 ITadviser Winter 2009
legacy
The current approach to IT is to custom-build systems and
incrementally change them as required. As the degree of
change increases over time, so does the complexity of the
system � driving up the cost of change exponentially.
Eventually a point is reached where starting afresh is
cheaper than changing the existing system and the cycle
begins again.
The existing system is confined to a digital landfill, in
some cases just months after deployment. Unless there is a
significant re-evaluation of our approach to IT and
innovation, we will continue to follow this evolutionary
blind alley and risk economic competitiveness and public
service delivery.
According to Oracle, "the average company spends from 60
to 85 percent of its IT budget maintaining legacy
applications that fail to meet the changing competitive
needs of the business." While the systems continue to work,
they haemorrhage money at a huge rate � and the risks and
impacts of failure are enormous.
As the volume of services delivered through online
channels increases, the reliance on IT infrastructure
becomes more critical. When the technology fails, the public
feels the pain, businesses lose customers and Governments
lose legitimacy.
Government IT � underskilled and over-
complex
There is no definite figure for how much Government
spends on IT. The Operational Efficiency Programme
estimated spending between �16bn and �20bn, while other
estimates put the figure several billions lower � and
higher.
Quite how Government can begin to consider cost savings
or new ways of delivering services when it is working with
a multi-billion pound margin of error is beyond this humble
CEO, but clearly something has to change.
Much of this money is being spent simply to keep the
lights on � and being paid to a small group of incumbent
suppliers who are making sizeable profits in the process.
Many large corporations face the same problem: they are
beholden to support costs to keep business-critical systems
working, while running the risk that if a system fails they
have no means of quickly replacing it.
In Government, large IT-enabled programmes have too
often gone wrong because experienced people who
understand both the applications and the technology have
been lost, with the domain knowledge of entire systems
handed over to outsourcers or lost through retirement.
The author
Martin Rice, CEO, Erudine
Digital Landfill
A decade into a new millennium, much
of our IT infrastructure is fit for digital
landfill � and we are continuing to pour
money into it at an alarming rate.
The Challenge of

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