Managing legacy system costs: A case study of a meta-assessment model to identify solutions in a large financial services company

Financial services organisations spend a significant amount of their IT budgets maintaining legacy systems. This paper identifies the characteristics of legacy systems and explores why such systems are so costly to maintain and support. Three models for the assessment and management of legacy system costs are examined and a new meta-model that addresses differences between the existing models is proposed. The new meta-model is then applied to a large UK financial services company - FinCo. Input data for the new meta-model are provided by the company's senior business and IT executives and the results compared with the firm's actual legacy system management plans. The paper concludes by identifying improvements the company should make to these current legacy system management plans and its longer-term strategy for managing legacy systems.