InformationWeek

Just couldn't get the words to Everyday People out of my head when former Microsoft chief operating officer Bob Herbold made his keynote presentation at InformationWeek's Spring Conference this morning. But where the song celebrates the common man and the virtues of getting along, Herbold wasn't celebrating the virtues of organizations' "legacy people."

That's not a wholesale recommendation to get rid of everyone who's been in the same position in a business for the last few years. After all, they likely got where they are because they are strong performers. But it is a call to shake up some of those individuals' workday lives, for the good of the business, and their own good, too. "Existing people really do become legacy people," Herbold says, "and they become very protective." Of their systems, processes, self-image, and comfort zone, which prevents them from having a healthy paranoia about the changes that may be overtaking the industry, and spells death to the necessary creativity that drives an organization to push for superior products and services. Herbold recommends personnel rotation as one antidote.

At heart, it comes down to many of the same questions that frame the discussion IT organizations have all the time about systems maintenance versus IT innovation, doesn't it? Sometimes it really is time to trash the old systems, and at other times it's critical to build the bridges to legacy systems that will let you extract value and drive change for today's business. Of course, it's probably a lot harder to do this when you're dealing with people than with cold hard code and systems. But good managers make the tough calls that help create the strategies that change their industry's entire direction. Or else, they're just part of the legacy problem, too.