Selling the Family Jewels
Ian Bailey
Not so long ago, I used to make a living extracting legacy (or “heritage”) data. This was usually necessary because the customer was moving to a new system or data format and needed to get their old data out. Usually, the systems involved were so old that no-one actually cared what you did with them so long as you didn’t break them or turn them off. The more tricky situation was always when the system was relatively new, and especially when it had been developed in-house.
In this case, you were either the enemy of the IT department or the enemy of the enthusiastic user who had developed the system. It was always a political minefield, but with a judicious amount of flattery (ooh, that’s clever what you did there, I’ll have to remember that next time I’m designing a database) there’d always be a way. When IT departments began to be outsourced, more hurdles were introduced – such as having to pay a premium to gain access to the person who wrote the system, because they had all of a sudden become part of the outsourcer’s consulting team. Still, if the project was prepared to pay for the troll, you could cross the bridge. Even if I couldn’t get support (in one case, the original developer had died two years before), I could always roll up my sleeves, put on the rubber gloves, and pull the data out the hard way. Those were the days…living on the edge…I always felt like Harry Tuttle in Brazil, but much much less cool.
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