Face up to obsolescence!

First, your legacy assets are likely to be found on a legacy or end-of-life operating system; with metadata that is barely, if at all, usable. If you have retained legacy assets on an obsolete operating system, you:

believe it to have value;
believe you have no choice but to persist with that application which may be vital for you;
believe migrating this legacy estate is a challenge because of the need to retain provenance & relationships with other systems whilst keeping everything working; or,
may require a means of virtualising that environment so that it is both operational and secure.

Whichever your situation, moving forward will inevitably require metadata to:

describe the legacy data;
describe the ‘AS IS’ data model and the eventual ‘TO BE’ destination;
aid re-use of those assets in future systems.
may require a means of virtualising that environment so that it is both operational and secure.
New item list

This prompts further considerations of security and absent metadata:

is the legacy estate secure or securable?
are the assets in an obsolete application from a recognised vendor or in a proprietary environment?
does the asset form part of a system of record? if not…..
is the asset of the type where metadata could reasonably be inferred if it is missing without compromising lineage?
what value might there be in the legacy asset providing its lineage remains intact?

The use of metadata repository technology to effect such work is not the magic bullet. Repositories by their nature are passive & will not adapt to probably changes to business processes & regulations. Metadatabases are at best, a taxonomic stepping stone though as a discipline, they can assist with the task of deciding if & when various legacy elements may be ‘retired’ or which elements are worthwhile including in any migration.

Retain & secure

If you intend to retain legacy estate (and their data and/or metadata) which perforce has to ‘live’ on unsupported or end-of-life operating systems then a number of scenarios apply:

legacy applications, resident on physical hardware;
legacy applications on virtual, on-premise hardware;
does the asset form part of a system of record? if not…..
what value might there be in the legacy asset providing its lineage remains intact?
not-just-legacy but ‘Jurassic’ applications.

Consider a futureproofing approach: a Droplet containerised portability solution. Droplet offers security, compliance, & compatibility for your legacy apps.

Evaluate & migrate

If you intend to migrate your legacy to cloud, then you face complex mapping decisions that can have ‘political’, technical & compliance implications:

which of the metadata should be ported (attracts additional cost & complexity to the project)?
which can be ported (constrained by cloud or quality of metadata)?
which metadata must retained as part of the historic record (tax, audit, governance)?
which metadata is still relevant to governance going forward (given changes in process and regulation)?
what does this mean for any data models, interoperability, integration, process chains or lineage preservation?

Dumping or destroying the legacy asset or its metadata may seem an attractive, short-term efficiency; but this ignores the long-term potential of historic information assets and the considerable time & effort expended on input. That legacy metadata could also ease other tasks.  There is no way to know for certain till you manually scrutinise them. Project managers will likely not thank you, but marketeers and data scientists might!

Don’t delay, act!

If it is decided that legacy metadata (or data)  is to be ‘archived’ somewhere, then understand that deferment is not a solution. This just postpones the inevitable pain, especially as in the intervening period, those who ‘knew’ the content may well have moved on. This loss is one of the reasons that organisations need to more actively use metadata to capture organisational knowledge. Short-term gain will be long-term pain as the cost and effort required to revive the knowledge will be far greater, despite the apparent balance sheet saving.

Our metadata sitrep will help you evaluate your legacy metadata situation and make wise decisions as to its future. Please enquire for further information.