14 H o w t o f i g u r e o u t i f y o u r C o r e S o f t w a r e h a s b e e n S u n s e t (Without you knowing it) By Charlie Kelly, R em edy Consulting One of our senior directors got a call a few weeks ago from the CEO of a bank core provider. Mr. CEO complained that one of our consultants mentioned to a client that his core system was no longer being supported. The CEO passionately argued that our consultant used the term “sunset” with the client related to his core system. Now I can see why a software executive would be upset if a consultant told clients that his core was no longer viable, but software can stay in the market a long time in “maintenance” mode. So perhaps we should spend a few minutes on how software decisions are made at the core banking system providers. Let me explain. Over my career, I spent several years managing software development teams through the Project Management Office (or PMO), including quite a bit of time at a large core provider. One important thing I learned: not all software gets the same amount of attention from the development team and senior management. Think of it this way: software companies have only so many resources to allocate to software development each year. Software development is an expense for a core banking systems provider. Based on sales from the previous year, depending on how much profit the management team wants to take and how much they want to spend on developers, they budget how much ends up in that specific software development bucket. If you are a CEO or CFO managing the budget at your community financial institution, you fully understand the resource allocation issue at hand. You have choices to make. So, let’s use an example of how budget allocation works at a software provider. Let’s say a software provider has two main products in its software budget, and each of those products has three projects where they can allocate their software developers: Product A Maintenance on Product A New functionality (roadmap item) 1 New functionality (roadmap item) 2 Product B Maintenance on Product B New functionality (roadmap item) 1 New functionality (roadmap item) 2
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