System Retirement Parameters

Introduction

Retirement requires sophisticated data extraction, validation, and reconciliation processes.

Orienting and letting all staffs understand the stability, more user-friendliness of a system is never an
easy task. This is the biggest challenge we are facing.
Due to complexity of retiring a system, managing the retirement of these systems must be completed
in stages, and not by adopting an overly simplistic unplug-and-play approach.
Because staff may use system data after retirement for reference information required for settlement
of disputes and/or to fulfill legal obligations, there has to be a procedure on how employees will
access the old data. This includes identifying data storage locations, access credentials (username and
password), policies, and defined retention period.
Training

The best transition time between system and receiving systems is the onsite training time. During this
time all employees learn on how to use receiving system, they will be trained about changed business
processes, basic receiving reports and features. During this time employees doubts are figured-out,
and as well as to determine the expectations of employees.
Customer service officers will be aware of the impact of the removal of a legacy system on the overall
institution’s future strategies.
Configuration

Retiring system should contain appropriate current configuration appropriately because reference will
be managed by obtained configuration of retiring system.
Reconciliation
Retiring system must be completed after having completing registering all issues and resolving these
and documenting reports against receiving system.
Parallel Run and Retirement Procedures
From first and/or second branches' retirement experiences people learn as retirement procedures
require more iterations, during which different issues are identified and resolved or any unresolved
issues between system and Receiving databases are noted in the report produced which can be used
later for review and audit purposes.
Running may last a period of time to ensure that all requirements are working properly in the
receiving system side. Of course this phase should be minimized by applying different approaches
because parallel run adds significant costs in terms of hardware, support, and staff attention.
Retirement of system is done only when the reconciling bodies recommend for action and when the
management is satisfied with presented reconciliation reports. And when verification is obtained that
the receiving is functioning properly.
Approach

Previously we had been using incremental iterative approach to retire system – both legacy and
receiving systems are working together for specified period of time. This is costly and takes much
time.
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Learning form past, there will be one time retirement approach in that reconciliation will be made on
migrated data rather than legacy system data. This is much better source of truth to manage the
retirement at once.
The Retirement Milestones
Retirement phase ends with the following retirement milestone. The milestone determines whether
the system has been successfully removed.
a) Central repository
There will be a central repository to archive all retiring system databases for agreed and reasonable
period of time.
Database in the archive will fully be indexed for easy discovery, secure, standardized access to
retrieval data by any authorized user in the future. Database will be stored with significant
compression and label when the application was last used.
b) Indexing the database for efficient searching
c) Validating the completeness and correctness of retired database
d) Preparing system independent print out access and compliance reports for reference from
retiring database
e) Ensuring security of the retired database to be accessed only by privileged users
f) Making ready signed retention and disposal policy taking regulatory requirements into
consideration
g) Terminating license Fees for legacy system

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