... their creaking technologies burden IF's maintenance budgets. Worse, argues Damian Smith, a vice president at Dallas-based Hitachi Consulting Corp., keeping mainframes and even client/server systems limping along chews up so many IT resources that many of the companies using them will be bypassed by more nimble competitors that adopt the flexible systems favored by younger IT workers. Smith warns that if your maintenance cost for aging technologies is more than 50% of your IT budget, "you are pretty much dead." (Perhaps that's why the consulting unit's parent company, Hitachi Ltd., used to sell mainframes.) But most IT dollars now should be spent on new systems in order to retire the old ones, Smith says.
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