The Quarterly Review of Legacy System Sustainment: Who Owns the Knowledge?
As the summer comes to a close and we head into the fourth quarter, Tania Scroggie, Director of OEM Relations at GDCA, Inc., returns with another installment of her Youtube series, Tania’s Teachables! This month, Tania explores a major challenge in the sustainment of legacy electronics: the ownership of the product and its legacy.
Every legacy is made by dozens of individual moving parts, the knowledge and experience of many different individuals, and that is especially true for electronics. And as Tania has observed over her years with GDCA, there truly is no one person who owns a legacy. With every innovation, every step into the future, we are all standing on the shoulders and the progress made by those who came before.
Unfortunately, all of the individual contributions to a legacy become lost in the noise of the excitement of what is to come.
These days, our industry is looking ahead to the future, with companies planning roadmaps as far ahead as twenty years or even more. Everyone focuses on the next big thing, be it a major company goal, a new technological innovation, or a shift in industry trends. And the further we look into the future, the harder and harder it becomes for our industry to remember the legacy that got us this far in the first place.
Because we are an industry focused on the next big thing, we often overlook the value not just of the legacy electronics that brought us this far, but the individual factors that went into creating the legacy. The documentation, the testing and validation apparatus, the tribal engineering and manufacturing expertise, the little things that make each product tick-these can and do get lost in the shuffle the further we look to the future.
And as that legacy slowly gets left behind, the question then becomes who really owns a legacy and what can we do to preserve and honor it for years to come? Those are the questions that Tania plans to explore as the year comes to a close.
Interested in learning more? Check out the full video from Tania Scroggie over on Youtube to join the discussion!
