Technical Debt, COBOL, and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Don't wait to pay off technical debt or it will cost you
A few days ago, IBM and the Open Mainframe Project kicked off an initiative to help a new generation of coders master a programming language called COBOL. If you've never heard of COBOL before here's the TL;DR of a more comprehensive article:
COBOL has been around a long time (~60 years).
43% of banking systems in 2017 used COBOL.
90% of ATM swipes relied on COBOL code in 2017.
COBOL experts are getting older and retiring, and there aren't enough new developers to replace them.
COBOL powers many government systems, including those used to manage unemployment requests (which are breaking as a result of surging demands due to COVID-19).
In short, COBOL is an integral part of important infrastructure, but the workforce required to keep it running is dwindling. These factors pose a real problem, as evidenced by the unemployment system breaks last week.
If you're like me and want to see COBOL in action for yourself, I suggest using this guide to run a classic "Hello, world!" executable with Cygdrive and OpenCOBOL
It's easy to look at the COBOL problem and point to sagging government budgets and suggest that with enough money the issue wouldn't exist. Higher education might also be taken to task, as COBOL classes have all but disappeared from curricula. Neither of these explanations sufficiently account for the issue, however. After all, budgets go up and down over the course of decades, and yet the problem persists. It's also easier now than ever to access free resources to learn any technology, so colleges can't shoulder the blame for a labor shortage. If anything, the lack of interest in COBOL training material should have alerted the government and commercial sectors that the technology was waning.
So how can we explain COBOL's ubiquity in the modern era? The primary issue seems to be the prevailing attitude "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." COBOL works well enough that organizations haven't seen a need to pay down any of the technical debt that it represents, and as a result this debt has ballooned to over 200 billion lines of code worldwide.
Confronted with the choice to accept the short-term pain of a change initiative in exchange for long-term benefits or to wait until something breaks, most opted to wait. It didn't seem to matter that warnings about impending COBOL labor shortages appeared as early as the 1990s, foreshadowing that the "wait and see" strategy was doomed to fail. Last week, when this strategy did fail, it was spectacular and public, impacting major infrastructure upon which hundreds-of-thousands of American citizens were counting to help them through the worst pandemic since 1918.
Unfortunately, this "wait for the break" paradigm goes far beyond COBOL. Many large companies fail to invest in modern software solutions for the same reasons they kept COBOL in place years after its expiration date. 89% of companies may use some kind of cloud solution, but a significant number of these same companies still keep legacy software or even Excel sheets in place as part of critical infrastructure. Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) and Shared Services have been particularly neglected, with many firms not even assessing these systems in terms of strategic value or monetized ROI. Few organizations enjoy fully integrated states in this space, even fewer leverage the data from these verticals effectively, and almost none have even started to consider the benefits offered by micro-services and containerization.
A deep desire to address these issues drove me and my co-founders to establish Eljun LLC. We are a tribe of combat veterans, PhD scientists, business management experts, artists, linguists, innovators, and explorers on a mission to transform HRIS and Shared Services technologies into modern, automated, and affordable insights generators using the power of Integrated Platform as a Service (iPaaS). You don't need to undertake the daunting, but rewarding, task of modernizing your business alone. We're here to partner with you, and together we can ensure that your business isn't confronting the next COBOL-like failure.
Contact Eljun LLC and learn how to transform your HRIS and Shared Services environment into an automated and affordable insights generator