If the CEO asks what to do with the COBOL

Over time, issues linked to COBOL have been postponed and today innovation is being crippled by this ongoing debt. Here's how to defuse it.

The COBOL Challenge

COBOL ascended to become a dominant programming language and a standard in the Mainframe Era throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1977 a Jimmy Carter's officer declared "If It's Not Broken, Don't Touch It". The idea was to save billions if the government adopt this simple motto. It was explained:  'That's the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren't broken and not fixing things that are broken.”

The motto sounded good to institutions CEOs. Those years they regarded IT as an expense, never as an investment.

Since then, the IT world went through constant evolution but any CIO looking for budgets to modernise the systems would hear that it is not broken.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to light the difficulties associated with the computer systems within U.S. government agencies. The sudden increased demand for services, especially unemployment benefits, overwhelmed systems that used COBOL.

Facing COVID 19 and the difficulty to bring COBOL to the cloud government and the private enterprises understood the need to modernise their systems.

There is no quick solution. Modernising COBOL is a slow process that starts by recognising the immense inversion made building those systems and it contains a huge number of intelligent solutions that must be preserved. It is also necessary to understand that COBOL prevailed sixty years because it is the best software language for business. COBOL is not the responsible for the data storing Americans of 150 years of age and the so-called spaghetti is consequence of patches, repatches of the code through the years. No other software language survived.

Modernisation Solutions

Many are the alternatives for COBOL modernisation.

·       Rebuilding is not only expensive and risky - it is almost impossible. Defining the business rules, regulations and promises embedded within legacy COBOL code presents a significant challenge.

·       Translation to JAVA will not erase the data problems or untangle the spaghetti. It will only create another layer of difficulties for maintaining the COBOL.

·       Microservices create redundancy problems.

SO, if any CEO ask you what can be done tell them:

·       Build your future team: Start paying your COBOL programmers better salaries. Instruct HR people to stop discriminating older people and start COBOL courses on the premises.

·       One by one, slowly but steady refactor your COBOL program: Break the monolithic programs of ten thousand lines into small modules and document them.

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