Case Study
Looking to the Future?
I90 Application
Discussion starts with the I90 application because it is central to the way the company runs. The new IT Director points that its original all-in-one design is monolithic and not really suitable as a modular platform for the next decade.
Being based on AS400\I Series it relies on a dedicated programming language called RPG. IT Staff with RPG skills are a dying breed she says, and she describes the age demographic of the in-house programming staff as "Grey Beards" .
The HR Director says this title is pejorative and that it would be better to use "mature" instead. Others round the table disagree there is any problem with programming staff availability and say recruitment has never been an issue.
The IBM platform is due for replacement in 2 year's time at a cost of £2-3 million, so there is a natural break point approaching.
There is considerable disquiet that the IT Director wants to dismantle I90 in favour of a new cloud based alternative so quickly.
Apart from cost of changing to something else, Board members feel there are serious risks associated with it - disruption for one and loss of skilled IT staff also comes to mind.
The Sales Director is against it, because he thinks it will distract from other initiatives like AI which will yield growth and revenue. He argues switching back office systems generates little return in the short term.
The Operations Director is also dead against it, he says Insure 90 is the backbone of the company and contains decades of intellectual capital and is absolutely rock solid, as is the I Series platform that it runs on and its all 100% under our control. We, he says " are not dependent on whether some nameless engineer on the West Coast of US, spills his coffee and brings down half of the World's compute by accident". He does acknowledge though the importance of integrating with the Industry's cloud quotation platforms, which is on offer from the latest commercial versions of the Insure/90 family; currently out of the question due to the age of the current in-house platform and bespoking that has taken place.
The CFO chips in here, saying that rushing the replacement of our core admin platform adds risk and provides little gain in the short term. That said, in his view it is a material risk and once reported will surely be picked up by firm's private equity owners as a hidden liability that detracts from the company's valuation and viability. The Regulatory Authority will also see it as a material threat and expect to see a programme of corrective work. Failure to carry out this work will result in fines or worse, additional demands for reserves, reducing profitability. He suggests that the board needs to get on the front foot and proposes adding provisional line items into the Future Capital Programme to show intent to interested parties.
The CEO has been listening to all of this and like the CFO is concerned how this might look externally, particularly to his PE masters. He says that whatever the merits of the current platform, it makes no sense to dig the hole any deeper. The in-house platform needs either to join up with the latest commercial version or be replaced; however long that takes. He wants to see proposals and potential timelines at a future meeting, for now though he feels the operational risks are acceptable.
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KOFAX
Next up is Kofax. This is a commercial product and is still current, however Kofax the company has become TungstenAutomation.
There is no ambiguity here, Tungsten have a clear end of life policy and publish "sunset schedules" for all its marketed products.
Unfortunately, the version of Kofax in use is Version 9.0 which went out of support in October 2019.
The IT Director explains that the upgrade requires weekend working for administration staff to test it works correctly with all the surrounding software. Unlike IT staff, they do not qualify for overtime, only time off in lieu. So it has proved difficult to get enough people to come in to do the testing and therefore upgrades have been postponed. This internal policy is blocking progress and she wants HR to review it.
Whatever the result of that turns out to be, as of now the platform is seriously out of date and out of support. She recommends upgrading and renewing maintenance contracts immediately.
J D Edwards ERP
J D Edwards comes in two versions, one of which is written in RPG and runs on IBM I series. The latest edition of which is called Enterprise World 9.4 . Internally, though, the company is running JDE EW version 7.3 . Plans to upgrade to a newer edition have been put off on several occasions over worries it will be too disruptive and cause the Accounts team to miss key shareholder and regulator reporting lines. But now things are coming to a head, Oracle moved Enterprise World 9.4 to extended support in April 2025 and so this product line is becoming obsolete.
Ever since Oracle acquired them the future of the J D Edwards(JDE) has been subject to speculation. In 2026 Oracle announced that premier support will be available for its other JDE line, EnterpriseOne 9.2 until 2037, so that is the migration path. At the meeting, the Finance Director says that rather than continue with JD Edwards he favours moving over to a another ERP solution, something that is necessary in the long term, if not a particularly welcome one to do at this time. He feels though, it is important to make a good choice because it will be a lasting one. He favours SAP personally, even though it is liable to be more expensive to implement, than switching to Oracle ERP which has a slick migration path. He feels SAP offers more functionality and a wider choice of partner consultancies that can help with migration , but admits that changing will be a disruptive process.