It was recently reported that the government of
California was having trouble implementing spending cuts because of
a lack of skilled
Cobol programmers. The state wanted to cut wages, but its
payroll system is written in Cobol and the lack of Cobol resources
made it difficult to effect the programming changes required,
writes Ian Anderson, director atDNAstream.
It is not an uncommon problem, with many large organisations,
including banks and governments, still running large parts of their
operational systems on Cobol. EDS recently reported that nearly 70%
of corporate systems are inflexible legacy systems. These can be
over 30 years old and are often heavily customised with little or
no supporting documentation.
The
call has gone out for more people to be trained in Cobol but,
despite the shortfall, most IT staff still prefer to learn newer
technologies such as Java and C# and maybe continuing to support
old, complex technology isn't the best answer anyhow.
At DNAstream, which specialises in services for SAP software, we
found an issue at many of our customers was that the SAP software
had to be interfaced with legacy Cobol systems, and this became a
very time consuming and costly task due to a lack of knowledge and
documentation on these old systems.
We decided to look for a more efficient way of overcoming this
issue and this led us to
Softwaremining
- a company which had developed software to automatically convert
from Cobol into modern object oriented technologies such as Java
and C#. The software also has a facility to undertake business
rules extraction to enable businesses to understand and document
what the old Cobol programs are actually doing.
After a thorough investigation, we were convinced that the
conversion tool did what it said on the tin - with a number of
customer testimonials to back this up - so we became partners. We
were really surprised that very few UK companies seemed to be aware
of this option for the issues they were having with their legacy
Cobol systems. Most seemed to be either struggling to support their
old systems or outsourcing the problem to India.
The Cobol conversion software largely automates the conversion
process, enabling projects to be completed in a fraction of the
time. There are many advantages to using this automated conversion
approach but the overwhelming key factor is significantly reduced
risk and cost. In one project, costs were one tenth and the project
was completed twenty times faster than an equivalent manual
rewrite.
As well as providing an alternative solution to the Cobol
shortage, we also found that there were additional customer
benefits such as increased IT and (knock-on) business flexibility
and the ability to move away from obsolescent hardware platforms.
The ongoing IT support costs after conversion were also
significantly reduced as existing staff could now maintain these
modernised systems and there was less need for Cobol support
staff.
There is also an increasing risk that Cobol skills will continue
to reduce further and companies will be unable to even simply
maintain their existing systems. A report by Butler Group in July
2008 concluded that the combination of Cobol resource problems and
technology limitations meant that companies running Cobol
applications will have to seriously consider code migration soon -
and with market estimates that the skills base will shrink
dramatically over the next ten years, manual code conversion may no
longer be an option.
Automatic conversion of Cobol code is by far the most cost
effective and minimal risk approach. The alternatives are to do a
manual re-write which is costly, complex and involves error-prone
manual work or to replace the legacy system with a new business
application - but this may not be possible, or may require
significant and expensive changes to the existing business
processes.
Butler Group, commenting on the tool, noted that the
flexibility, cost-effectiveness and rapid results that can be
delivered add up to a strong business case.
Yes there is a Cobol resource problem and yes there is an
alternative solution - convert your Cobol.