The Case for Teaching Legacy Systems Modernization

Transforming legacy information systems to more modern technologies is a top-of-mind topic for a large percentage of today's corporate CIOs. Organizations face several challenges in modernizing their application portfolios, including a lack of awareness regarding the most effective approaches for application modernization, as well as access to a dwindling supply of resources skilled in mainframe environments and older programming languages. This paper shows how education in topics related to legacy systems modernization can help to fill in these gaps, and can provide critical skills as systems modernization becomes a dominant component of the IT landscape. The organization of a representative course is proposed, along with an experience report for the first delivery of this course.