[nfbcs] [Fwd: Article on COBOL - Computerworld]
William Ritchhart
william.ritchhart at sbcglobal.net
Sun Mar 18 22:48:14 UTC 2012
I have serious doubts about the accuracy of the article. Most of the COBOL
programmers I know have like myself been RIFFd in the past five years.
Those of us who have found new jobs have found them for 25% to 40% less than
we were earning prior to the RIF. The guys running most corporations claim
they can teach anybody to code Cobol. So the trend has been to off-shore
90% of the programmer jobs to the Philippines and India. They believe the
10% of Americans who are left can teach the business knowledge.
The 10% that is left not only has to provide that business knowledge spoken
of in the article. But they also have to review every line of code
generated by the off-shore programmers who often did not learn COBOL in
college. Those off-shore folks are learning java. Just like American kids.
The company Accenture that is referred to often in the article is one of
those companies who convince CEO's to off-shore COBOL applications, hire
young programmers in the Philippines and India and immediately train them in
COBOL. They have big rooms with hundreds of programmers all in the room
sitting at long tables. They can reach out and touch the person next to
themselves. The really interesting thing and perhaps most dangerous thing
is that they are sitting next to one another and they are coding for
competitors.
And before one of you jump in and say I don't know what I am talking about,
I saw it for myself while I was still at AT&T. Accenture employed
programmers for several of the American telecoms and they were sitting right
next to one another in a room in Mumbai.
I strongly suggest that anybody who is young and considering a career in
programming, you learn all the new stuff you can. You had also better be
prepared to compete with people in India who will work for about one tenth
of what the average IT professional in the U.S. earns.
Thanks, William
-----Original Message-----
From: nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Tracy Carcione
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2012 9:19 AM
To: nfbcs at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nfbcs] [Fwd: Article on COBOL - Computerworld]
Here is an article on the ongoing demand for COBOL programmers. I work in
COBOL, among other things. It's a very blind-friendly language--no
graphics. It may be a career opportunity for someone out there in
NFBCS-land.
Tracy
Computerworld
Brain drain: Where Cobol systems go from here When the last Cobol
programmers walk out the door, 50 years of business processes encapsulated
in the software they created may follow. By Robert L. Mitchell March 14,
2012 06:00 AM ET
Computerworld - David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT
transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the
health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs -- 343 million lines of code
-- that run core banking and other operations. But many of the people who
built that code base, some of which goes back to the early days of Cobol
in the 1960s, will be retiringover the next several years.
"We have people we will be losing who have a lot of business knowledge.
That scares me," Brown says. He's concerned about finding new Cobol
programmers, who are expected to be in short supplyin the next five to ten
years. But what really keeps him up at night is the thought that he may
not be able to transfer the deep understanding of the business logic
embedded within the bank's programs before it walks out the door with the
employees who are retiring.
More than 50 years after Cobol came on the scene, the language is alive
and wellin the world's largest corporations, where it excels at executing
large-scale batch and transaction processing operations on mainframes. The
language is known for its scalability, performance and mathematical
accuracy. But as the Boomer generation prepares to check out of the
workforce, IT executives are taking a fresh look at their options.
Is Cobol being used in your organization to develop new business
applications?
Yes - 53%
No - 44%
Don't know - 3%
Base: 131
In a Computerworldsurveyof 357 IT professionals conducted recently, 46%
said they are already noticing a Cobol programmer shortage in the market,
while 50% said the average age of their Cobol staff is 45 or older; 22%
said the age is 55 or older.
"Organizations are trying not to get backed into a corner because of the
skills issue," says Paul Vallely, mainframe sales director at software
vendor Compuware Corp. "I haven't seen companies move off mainframes due
to the Cobol skills shortage yet, but it's looming."
For Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, which bought its first mainframe in
1955, keeping the core Cobol applications that run the business on the
mainframe makes sense. Modernization efforts have made those programs more
accessible through the use of Web services and more up-to-date user
interfaces.
But for other types of non-core applications, and for smaller workloads,
organizations have been gradually migrating off of mainframes -- and away
from Cobol. In some cases those Cobol programs are simply re-hostedon
Linux or Windows servers; in other cases they're rewritten in other,
object oriented languages; and some programs are being replaced with
packaged software.
They might want something more flexible but they just can't do it. They're
captive to Cobol. Adam Burden, global application modernization lead,
Accenture
"Over the past five years there has been an acceleration of [some]
businesses moving off host platforms," says Adam Burden, global
application modernization lead at Accenture. Often that means leaving
Cobol behind by either rewriting it for J2EE or .Net or moving to packaged
software.
Over the last few years, Gartner estimates that the world has seen about a
5% decline in total Cobol code, says analyst Dale Vecchio. Much of that
involved migrations by small- and medium-sized mainframe shops that move
off what they see as a legacy language when they retire the hardware.
It's declining because the functions can be developed by some other
building block. "Cobol is no longer needed," Vecchio says. "There are
alternatives."
While rehosting can get code off the mainframe quickly -- Micro Focus
sells a platform that will support it on a Microsoft Azure cloud -- that
is often seen as intermediate step. It can be used as a way to get Cobol
off the mainframe quickly, before eventually completely modernizing and
transforming those legacy programs.
Cobol's image problem
Cobol, as a procedural language, is not perceived to be as agile as
object-oriented languages for modern programming needs such as mobile apps
and the Web. And despite the availability of state-of-the-art Cobol
development environments -- including IBM's Enterprise Cobol on the
mainframe and Micro Focus' Visual Cobol, which integrates well with
Microsoft's Visual Studio development suite for .Net -- Cobol is widely
viewed as a legacy language.
Nearly half (49%) of survey respondents whose organizations don't use
Cobol say the reason is that the language is simply outdated.
Not everyone agrees, of course. "Cobol has had lasting value, and it's not
broken," says Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow and chief technology officer of
enterprise modernization tools, compilers and security at IBM.
Some 64% of Computerworld readers concur, and say their organizations
still use Cobol -- more than any modern language except for
Java/JavaScript and Visual Basic. The last time we ran a Cobol survey,
back in 2006, some 62% of respondents said they still used Cobol at that
point.
To what extent does your organization or systems use these programming
languages?
Language name A lot A little None
Cobol 48% 16% 37%
JavaScript 41% 41% 19%
Java 39% 40% 22%
C# 26% 25% 50%
VB.net 25% 38% 38%
Visual Basic 22% 49% 30%
Base: 202
In the more recent survey, over 50% of respondents say Cobol represents
more than half of all internal business application code.
"There has been no renaissance for Cobol," says Accenture's Burden.
"There's not a whole lot of new development going on. But our clients are
enhancing their core applications and continue to maintain them." Indeed,
53% of readers say they're still building at least some new business
applications in Cobol. The vast majority of that code is still being
written for the mainframe.
But IT organizations also don't have much choice. Migrating large-scale
systems built in Cobol is just too costly and risky a proposition. "They
might want something more flexible but they just can't do it. They're
captive to Cobol," Burden says.
The down economy has helped put off the inevitable, Compuware's Vallely
says. "Economic issues provided everyone with a hall pass because not as
many folks were looking to retire," he says. But as the economy improves,
retirement plans may pick up too. "Organizations are trying to be more
proactive," he predicts.
"No other language has seen as big an impact from changes in the
demographics of the workforce as has Cobol," Vecchio says. Going forward
it will become more difficult to maintain a Cobol portfolio.
"The inflexion point will come when enough Cobol programmers have retired
that an organization can no longer tolerate the risk," he says. At that
point, most of those programs will migrate -- but not all.
Rightsizing Cobol
For BNY Mellon, those Cobol batch and transaction processing programs on
the mainframe represent an enormous investment. And while Gartner says
it's technically possible to move mainframe workloads of up to 3,000 MIPS,
the workload at the bank, which relies heavily on Cobol, consumes 52,000
MIPS of processing horsepower, spans nine mainframes and is growing at a
10% clip each year.
"The business wants us to make investments in programming that buys them
new revenue. Rewriting an application doesn't buy them any value-add,"
Brown says.
Instead, the strategy is to "rightsize" some non-core applications off the
mainframe where there's a business benefit, try to keep mainframe MIPS
growth under 5%, and stay the course with the bank's core Cobol
applications by passing on the business knowledge to younger programmers
the bank will need to recruit and train. (See sidebar.)
Other functions, such as general ledger and reporting, are moving onto
distributed computing platforms, where they are either replaced by
packaged software or reengineered into Java or .Net applications.
But Brown still needs Cobol programmers to replace those expected to
retire, and the learning curve can extend out for a year or more. That
means adding staff and having a period of overlap as Cobol's secrets get
passed on to the next generation. "I'm trying to get those people onboard
and do the knowledge transfer sooner rather than later," Brown says.
But that kind of proactive approach, and the extra costs it incurs, can be
a hard sell. "We haven't gotten to the point of feeling the pain yet. When
we do, it will happen," he says.
Brown wouldn't specify the number of people he's hoping to hire, but said
that the "real heavy need" will happen in the next five to 10 years, as
the original mainframe programmers are expected to retire en force during
that period. BNY Mellon currently has "a few hundred" Cobol programmers on
staff, Brown says.
Brown's concerns are well placed, says David Garza, president and CEO of
Trinity Millennium Group, a software engineering firm that has handled
code transformations for large businesses and government organizations.
"Almost every job we get has Cobol in it," he says, and most of the calls
come from organizations that have already lost their collective knowledge
of the business logic. At that point, he says, "it's a big risk."
The cost of waiting
Trinity Millennium Group and other vendors like it have established
processes for analyzing and extracting the business rules embedded between
the lines of Cobol code. "The solutions have come a long way in terms of
the ability to extract logic and rules," says Burden.
But the process is time consuming and costly. One Millennium client
recently spent $1 million to have its Cobol programs analyzed and business
logic reconstructed as part of a migration project off the mainframe. "If
they had the legacy programmers there and we had done the exercise with
them, it would have cost $200,000 and taken one-tenth of the time," Garza
says. If you wait until that institutional knowledge is gone, he warns,
the costs can be as much as ten times higher than it would have been
beforehand.
Are you noticing a shortage of Cobol skills in the labor market?
Yes - 46%
No - 23%
Not yet; expect it within 5 years - 22%
Don't know - 8%
Base: 131
Compounding the loss of skills and business knowledge is the fact that,
for some organizations, decades of changes have created a convoluted mess
of spaghetti code that even the most experienced programmers can't figure
out. "Some systems are snarled so badly that programmers aren't allowed to
change the code at all," Garza says. "It's simply too risky to change it.
They're frozen solid."
Package deal
That's the situation faced by Jim Gwinn, chief information officer for the
USDA's Farm Service Agency. The USDA's System/36 and AS/400 systems run
Cobol programs that process $25 billion in farm loans and programs. "We
have millions of lines of Cobol and there's a long history of it being
rewritten," he says. "It has become increasingly difficult to change the
code because of the complexity and the attrition of the knowledge base
that wrote it." That's a big problem because laws that govern farm
programs change every year, driving a need to update the code to reflect
those changes.
Gwinn hired consultants from IBM, who concluded that rewriting the
programs in a different language or rehosting them on a distributed
computing platform would be complicated and costly. But the System/36
hardware had to go, so Gwinn decided to bite the bullet: FSA will move off
of its end-of-life mainframe systems by rewriting some of the code in Java
and replacing the rest with packaged software from SAP.
But Gwinn says he'll miss Cobol. "It has been very stable and consistent,
with little breakage due to code changes, which you see with Java-based
changes," he says. "And in a distributed environment you have to balance
your workloads a little more carefully."
Going for a rewrite
The anticipated exit of institutional knowledge and shortage of Cobol
programmers were also primary drivers behind NYSE Euronext's decision to
reengineer 1 million lines of Cobol on a mainframe that ran the stock
exchange's post-trade systems. While Cobol was dependable, it wasn't
viewed as maintainable in the long run.
If your organization doesn't use Cobol, why not? (Multiple responses
allowed.)
Cobol is an outdated language - 49%
We no longer have mainframes/We have discontinued Cobol - 42%
Cobol is an inferior language compared to the ones we use - 35%
Lack of Cobol skills in-house or in the labor market - 22%
Our enterprise is too small to have Cobol applications - 21%
Our enterprise is too new to have Cobol applications - 21%
Base: 77
Steven Hirsch, chief architect and chief data officer, cites the need to
make changes very rapidly as another key reason the NYSE abandoned Cobol.
"Ultimately, the code was not easily changeable in terms of what the
business needed to move forward. We were pushing the envelope of what it
took to scale the Cobol environment," he says.
So NYSE rewrote Cobol programs that run its post-trade systems for Ab
Initio, a parallel-processing platform that runs under Linux on high-end
Hewlett-Packard DL580 servers. The new environment allows for more rapid
development, and the rewrite also eliminated a substantial amount of
unnecessary and redundant code that had crept into the original Cobol
programs over the years.
If the business' Cobol code doesn't need to change much, and many batch
and transaction processing programs don't, it can be maintained on or off
of the mainframe indefinitely. But that philosophy wouldn't work for NYSE.
"We are a rapidly changing business and we needed to move faster than our
legacy code," Hirsch says.
As for trading, that's all proprietary NYSE Euronext software. "There's no
Big Iron or Cobol," Hirsch explains. "There's been no use of mainframes in
the trading environment for many years."
Rehosting: Lift and shift
When it comes to hiring new Cobol programmers, Jonathan J. Miller,
director of information systems and services for Saginaw County, Michigan,
is struggling. "We've lost our systems programming staff," he says. And
like many government IT organizations that have suffered from budget cuts,
he doesn't have much to offer those in-demand Cobol programmers.
What's your organization's interest in outsourcing Cobol maintenance,
either onshore or offshore?
Not interested - 73%
Currently outsourcing - 18%
Interested - 8%
Base: 131
Generous government benefits used to attract candidates even when salaries
were lower than in private business. Now, he says, "Our pay hasn't
increased in eight years and benefits are diminished." To fill in the gap,
the county has been forced to contract with retired employees and
outsource Cobol maintenance and support to a third party -- something that
just 18% of Computerworld readers say they are doing today.
The Cobol brain drain is starting to become critical for many government
organizations, says Garza. "It's a high risk problem in many countries we
are doing work in. The people have retired. Even the managers are gone.
There's no one to talk to."
Saginaw County found itself hemmed in by the complexity of its Cobol
infrastructure. It has four million lines of highly integrated Cobol
programs that run everything from the prosecutor's office to payroll on a
46 MIPS Z9 series mainframe that is at end of life. With mainframe
maintenance costs rising 10% to 20% each year, the county needs to get off
the platform quickly.
What's your organization's interest in outsourcing Cobol development,
either onshore or offshore?
Not interested - 81%
Currently outsourcing - 12%
Interested - 7%
Base: 131
But commercial software packages lack the level of integration users
expect, and Miller's team doesn't have the time and resources to do a lot
of integration work or reengineer all of the program code for another
platform.
So the county is starting a multi-phase project to recompile the code with
Micro Focus Visual Cobol and re-host it on Windows servers. An associated
VSAM database will also be migrated to SQL Server. Miller hopes that the
more modern graphical development suite will make the Cobol programming
position, which has gone unfilled for two years, more attractive to
prospective programmers. But he acknowledges that finding talent will
still be an uphill battle.
A legacy continues
Is there a role for Cobol off the mainframe? "I don't believe there is.
Cobol and the mainframe run well together, and that's where I want to keep
it," BNY Mellon's Brown says. But the bank is still creating new Cobol
components on the mainframe, and will continue to do so.
That's a common sentiment among Accenture's large corporate customers,
says Burden. Cobol will continue its gradual decline as midrange systems
are retired and businesses continue to modernize legacy Cobol code or move
to packaged software. Today Cobol is no longer the strategic language on
which the business builds new applications. But it still represents the
"family jewels" of business, Burden says. "They're enhancing existing
applications and adding functionality to them. I've seen no slowdown in
those activities."
If companies can't find talent to keep that infrastructure going,
outsourcing firms such as Accenture are ready, says Burden. The scale of
Accenture's support operation is large enough to provide a career track
for Cobol programmers, and he says it's easy to cross-train programmers on
the language. "We can turn out new programmers quickly. So if clients
can't support Cobol, we will."
"People make too much of that trend that we're not graduating enough Cobol
programmers," says IBM's Stoodley. Preserving the institutional knowledge
is what's critical. "You can make a problem for yourself if you don't keep
your team vibrant," he says. But as long as there's a demand for it,
"businesses will find people willing to work on Cobol."
"You have to respect the architecture of Cobol," Burden says. It may have
been created for simpler times in application development, but it remains
the bedrock of many IT infrastructures. "I don't see that changing for
another 10 years, or even longer."
SIDEBAR: Closing the Cobol talent gap
Where do you find Cobol programmers these days? College graduates with
training in Cobol are in short supply. In Michigan, for example, state
schools that offer Cobol programming have cancelled classes due to a lack
of interest. "They can't get anyone to enroll," says Jonathan Miller,
director of Saginaw County Information Systems and Services.
But some colleges are still providing Cobol training -- with help from
IBM. The mainframe vendor has developed curriculain association with more
than 80 colleges and universities ranging from Brigham Young to Texas A&M.
"We donate hardware and software, help with the curriculum, and they
graduate hundreds of people every year," says Kevin Stoodley, IBMfellow
and chief technology officer.
The Guardian Life Insurance Co. has recruited Cobol programmers from
Workforce Opportunity Services, a nonprofit that collaborates with
business clients and local colleges to train economically disadvantaged
students to fill less popular technology disciplines such as Cobol
programming. "They take kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods and provide
them as consultants," says former Guardian CIO Frank Wander, who now has
his own consultancy, IT Excellence Institute.
"It's sort of a work/study program. We have over 200 consultants today in
five states, and we're expanding," says Workforce founder Art Langer.
BNY Mellon and many other organizations also increasingly rely on
outsourcingfirms to pick up maintenance and support duties. But for many
customers with mission-critical applications, offshore is not the place to
keep the institutional knowledge of the business rules that is behind that
code. David Brown, managing director of BNY Mellon's IT transformation
group, says the bank wants those skills in house.
Fortunately, it's not all that difficult to cross-train programmers in
Cobol. "Right now it's pretty easy to hire programmers, and if they
understand Java I can bring them back to procedural languages like Cobol,"
Brown says. The trick, he says, is to develop a curriculum that teaches
not just Cobol, but the business rules behind the code that runs the
company. "We need to make sure we can roll that forward."
- Robert L. Mitchell
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<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff;
font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div
id=yui_3_2_0_17_133199706597243><SPAN id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972135><BR
class=yui-cursor></SPAN></div>
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id=yui_3_2_0_17_133199706597245></div>
<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: times new roman, new york, times, serif;
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<DIV style="FONT-FAMILY: times new roman, new york, times, serif;
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<DIV dir=ltr><FONT id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972138 size=2
face=Arial>----- Forwarded Message -----<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT:
bold">From:</SPAN></B> "glen.rivara at bnymellon.com"
<glen.rivara at bnymellon.com><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT:
bold">To:</SPAN></B> Glen_Anthony_Rivara at yahoo.com <BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Friday, March 16, 2012 11:35
AM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Fw:
Interesting Article on COBOL - Computerworld<BR></FONT></DIV><WBR>
<DIV id=yiv1370088365><FONT id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972148 size=2
face=sans-serif>Glen A. Rivara, SA<BR>Asset Servicing Technology<BR>The
Bank of New York Mellon<BR>101 Barclay, St., 15E<BR>New York, NY
10286<BR>(212) 815-4496<BR>email: glen.rivara at bnymellon.com</FONT>
<WBR><FONT color=#800080 size=1 face=sans-serif>----- Forwarded by Glen A.
Rivara/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY on 03/16/2012 11:35 AM -----</FONT> <WBR><WBR><FONT
color=#5f5f5f size=1 face=sans-serif>From:
</FONT><FONT size=1 face=sans-serif>Stephen
Lieberman/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY</FONT> <WBR><FONT color=#5f5f5f size=1
face=sans-serif>To: </FONT><FONT size=1
face=sans-serif>Glen A. Rivara/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY at BNYMELLON, Jean
Hawreluk/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY at BNYMELLON, James
Mcgrattan/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY at BNYMELLON, Laurence D.
Jacobs/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY at BNYMELLON, Shahanas
Salam/CorpUS/BNYMellon at BNYMellon, James
McMahon/NY/DOMESTIC/BNY at BNYMELLON</FONT> <WBR><FONT
color=#5f5f5f size=1 face=sans-serif>Date:
</FONT><FONT size=1 face=sans-serif>03/14/2012 07:14 PM</FONT>
<WBR><FONT color=#5f5f5f size=1 face=sans-serif>Subject:
</FONT><FONT size=1 face=sans-serif>Fw: Interesting Article
on COBOL - Computerworld</FONT> <WBR>
<DIV style="BORDER-BOTTOM: #ccc 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid;
PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; LINE-HEIGHT: 0; MARGIN: 5px 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px;
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solid; BORDER-RIGHT: #ccc 1px solid; PADDING-TOP: 0px" class="hr yui-non
yui-skip" readonly="true" contenteditable="false"></DIV><WBR><WBR><FONT
size=2 face=sans-serif>Very interesting article. Lisa Jacques sent to me.
</FONT><WBR><WBR><WBR><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225079/Brain_drain_Where_Cobol
_systems_go_from_here_"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT
size=3>http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225079/Brain_drain_Where_Cobo
l_systems_go_from_here_</FONT></A>
<WBR><FONT size=6><B
id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972183><BR>Computerworld<BR><BR>Brain drain:
Where Cobol systems go from here </B></FONT><WBR><FONT size=5><B>When the
last Cobol programmers walk out the door, 50 years of business processes
encapsulated in the
software they created may follow. </B></FONT><WBR><FONT size=3>By
</FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/author/572/Robert%20L.%20+Mitchell"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>Robert L.
Mitchell</U></FONT></A> <WBR><FONT size=3>March 14, 2012 06:00 AM
ET</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Computerworld - David Brown is worried. As managing
director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is
responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs -- 343
million lines of code -- that run core banking and other operations. But
many of the people who built that code base, some of which goes back to
the early days of Cobol in the 1960s, </FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9062478/Confessions_of_a_Cobol_
programmer"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>will be
retiring</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> over the next several years. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"We have people we will be losing who have a lot of
business knowledge. That scares me," Brown says. He's concerned about
finding new Cobol programmers, who are expected to be </FONT><A
href="http://blogs.computerworld.com/15177/baby_boomer_retirements_another_d
eath_knell_for_cobol"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>in short
supply</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> in the next five to ten years. But what
really keeps him up at night is the thought that he may not be able to
transfer the deep understanding of the business logic embedded within the
bank's programs before it walks out the door with the employees who are
retiring. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>More than 50 years after Cobol came on the scene, the
language is </FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/266156/Cobol_Not_Dead_Yet"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>alive and
well</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> in the world's largest corporations,
where it excels at executing large-scale batch and transaction processing
operations on mainframes. The language is known for its scalability,
performance and mathematical accuracy. But as the Boomer generation
prepares to check out of the workforce, IT executives are taking a fresh
look at their options.</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972193><FONT size=3>Is Cobol being used in
your organization to develop new business applications?</FONT> <BR><FONT
id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972196 size=3><BR>Yes - 53%</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=3>No - 44%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Don't know - 3%</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=3>Base: 131</FONT>
<div><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225099/Cobol_brain_drain_Surve
y?taxonomyId=154&pageNumber=1"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>In a
<I>Computerworld</U></I><U> survey</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> of 357 IT
professionals conducted recently, 46% said they are already noticing a
Cobol programmer shortage in the market, while 50% said the average age of
their Cobol staff is 45 or older; 22% said the age is 55 or older. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"Organizations are trying not to get backed into a
corner because of the skills issue," says Paul Vallely, mainframe sales
director at software vendor Compuware Corp. "I haven't seen companies move
off mainframes due to the Cobol skills shortage yet, but it's looming."
</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>For Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, which bought its
first mainframe in 1955, keeping the core Cobol applications that run the
business on the mainframe makes sense. Modernization efforts have made
those programs more accessible through the use of Web services and more
up-to-date user interfaces. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But for other types of non-core applications, and for
smaller workloads, organizations have been gradually migrating off of
mainframes -- and away from Cobol. In some cases those Cobol programs
</FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175840/One_firm_s_story_The_ma
inframe_goes_but_Cobol_stays_behind"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>are simply
re-hosted</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> on Linux or Windows servers; in
other cases they're rewritten in other, object oriented languages; and
some programs are being replaced with packaged software. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>They might want something more flexible but they just
can't do it. They're captive to Cobol. Adam Burden, global application
modernization lead, Accenture </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"Over the past five years there has been an acceleration
of [some] businesses moving off host platforms," says Adam Burden, global
application modernization lead at Accenture. Often that means leaving
Cobol behind by either rewriting it for J2EE or .Net or moving to packaged
software. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Over the last few years, Gartner estimates that the
world has seen about a 5% decline in total Cobol code, says analyst Dale
Vecchio. Much of that involved migrations by small- and medium-sized
mainframe shops that move off what they see as a legacy language when they
retire the hardware.</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>It's declining because the functions can be developed by
some other building block. "Cobol is no longer needed," Vecchio says.
"There are alternatives."</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972201><FONT size=3>While rehosting can get
code off the mainframe quickly -- Micro Focus sells a platform that will
support it on a Microsoft Azure cloud -- that is often seen as
intermediate step. It can be used as a way to get Cobol off the mainframe
quickly, before eventually completely modernizing and transforming those
legacy programs. </FONT><BR><FONT size=4><B
id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972204><BR>Cobol's image problem</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Cobol, as a procedural language, is not perceived to be
as agile as object-oriented languages for modern programming needs such as
mobile apps and the Web. And despite the availability of state-of-the-art
Cobol development environments -- including IBM's Enterprise Cobol on the
mainframe and Micro Focus' Visual Cobol, which integrates well with
Microsoft's Visual Studio development suite for .Net -- Cobol is widely
viewed as a legacy language. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Nearly half (49%) of survey respondents whose
organizations don't use Cobol say the reason is that the language is
simply outdated. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Not everyone agrees, of course. "Cobol has had lasting
value, and it's not broken," says Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow and chief
technology officer of enterprise modernization tools, compilers and
security at IBM. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Some 64% of <I>Computerworld</I> readers concur, and say
their organizations still use Cobol -- more than any modern language
except for Java/JavaScript and Visual Basic. The last time we ran a Cobol
survey, </FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/266156/Cobol_Not_Dead_Yet?taxon
omyId=11&pageNumber=1"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>back in
2006</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3>, some 62% of respondents said they still
used Cobol at that point.</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972206><FONT size=3><B>To what extent does
your organization or systems use these programming languages?</B></FONT>
<TABLE width="100%">
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD width="41%">
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>Language name</B></FONT></DIV>
<TD width="2%"><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD width="12%">
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>A lot </B></FONT></DIV>
<TD width="4%"><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD width="15%">
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>A little</B></FONT></DIV>
<TD width="10%"><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD width="13%">
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>None</B></FONT></DIV>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>Cobol </B></FONT></DIV>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>48% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>16% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>37%</FONT>
<TD>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>JavaScript </B></FONT></DIV>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>41%</FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>41%</FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>19%</FONT>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>Java</B></FONT></DIV>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>39%</FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>40% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>22% </FONT>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>C#</B></FONT></DIV>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>26% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>25% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>50% </FONT>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>VB.net</B></FONT></DIV>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>25% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>38% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>38% </FONT>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV align=center><FONT size=3><B>Visual Basic</B></FONT></DIV>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>22% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>49% </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3> </FONT>
<TD><FONT size=3>30% </FONT></TR></TBODY></TABLE><BR><BR><FONT
size=3>Base: 202</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>In the more recent survey, over 50% of respondents say
Cobol represents more than half of all internal business application code.
</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"There has been no renaissance for Cobol," says
Accenture's Burden. "There's not a whole lot of new development going on.
But our clients are enhancing their core applications and continue to
maintain them." Indeed, 53% of readers say they're still building at least
some new business applications in Cobol. The vast majority of that code is
still being written for the mainframe. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But IT organizations also don't have much choice.
Migrating large-scale systems built in Cobol is just too costly and risky
a proposition. "They might want something more flexible but they just
can't do it. They're captive to Cobol," Burden says. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>The down economy has helped put off the inevitable,
Compuware's Vallely says. "Economic issues provided everyone with a hall
pass because not as many folks were looking to retire," he says. But as
the economy improves, retirement plans may pick up too. "Organizations are
trying to be more proactive," he predicts.</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"No other language has seen as big an impact from
changes in the demographics of the workforce as has Cobol," Vecchio says.
Going forward it will become more difficult to maintain a Cobol portfolio.
</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972209><FONT size=3>"The inflexion point
will come when enough Cobol programmers have retired that an organization
can no longer tolerate the risk," he says. At that point, most of those
programs will migrate -- but not all.</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=4><B>Rightsizing Cobol</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>For BNY Mellon, those Cobol batch and transaction
processing programs on the mainframe represent an enormous investment. And
while Gartner says it's technically possible to move mainframe workloads
of up to 3,000 MIPS, the workload at the bank, which relies heavily on
Cobol, consumes 52,000 MIPS of processing horsepower, spans nine
mainframes and is growing at a 10% clip each year. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"The business wants us to make investments in
programming that buys them new revenue. Rewriting an application doesn't
buy them any value-add," Brown says. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Instead, the strategy is to "rightsize" some non-core
applications off the mainframe where there's a business benefit, try to
keep mainframe MIPS growth under 5%, and stay the course with the bank's
core Cobol applications by passing on the business knowledge to younger
programmers the bank will need to recruit and train. (See sidebar.)</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Other functions, such as general ledger and reporting,
are moving onto distributed computing platforms, where they are either
replaced by packaged software or reengineered into Java or .Net
applications.</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But Brown still needs Cobol programmers to replace those
expected to retire, and the learning curve can extend out for a year or
more. That means adding staff and having a period of overlap as Cobol's
secrets get passed on to the next generation. "I'm trying to get those
people onboard and do the knowledge transfer sooner rather than later,"
Brown says. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But that kind of proactive approach, and the extra costs
it incurs, can be a hard sell. "We haven't gotten to the point of feeling
the pain yet. When we do, it will happen," he says.</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Brown wouldn't specify the number of people he's hoping
to hire, but said that the "real heavy need" will happen in the next five
to 10 years, as the original mainframe programmers are expected to retire
en force during that period. BNY Mellon currently has "a few hundred"
Cobol programmers on staff, Brown says.</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972211><FONT size=3>Brown's concerns are
well placed, says David Garza, president and CEO of Trinity Millennium
Group, a software engineering firm that has handled code transformations
for large businesses and government organizations. "Almost every job we
get has Cobol in it," he says, and most of the calls come from
organizations that have already lost their collective knowledge of the
business logic. At that point, he says, "it's a big risk."</FONT>
<BR><FONT size=4><B>The cost of waiting</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Trinity Millennium Group and other vendors like it have
established processes for analyzing and extracting the business rules
embedded between the lines of Cobol code. "The solutions have come a long
way in terms of the ability to extract logic and rules," says Burden.
</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But the process is time consuming and costly. One
Millennium client recently spent $1 million to have its Cobol programs
analyzed and business logic reconstructed as part of a migration project
off the mainframe. "If they had the legacy programmers there and we had
done the exercise with them, it would have cost $200,000 and taken
one-tenth of the time," Garza says. If you wait until that institutional
knowledge is gone, he warns, the costs can be as much as ten times higher
than it would have been beforehand.</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972213><FONT size=3>Are you noticing a
shortage of Cobol skills in the labor market?</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Yes
- 46%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>No - 23%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Not yet;
expect it within 5 years - 22%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Don't know -
8%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Base: 131</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Compounding the loss of skills and business knowledge is
the fact that, for some organizations, decades of changes have created a
convoluted mess of spaghetti code that even the most experienced
programmers can't figure out. "Some systems are snarled so badly that
programmers aren't allowed to change the code at all," Garza says. "It's
simply too risky to change it. They're frozen solid."</FONT>
<div><FONT size=4><B>Package deal</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>That's the situation faced by Jim Gwinn, chief
information officer for the USDA's Farm Service Agency. The USDA's
System/36 and AS/400 systems run Cobol programs that process $25 billion
in farm loans and programs. "We have millions of lines of Cobol and
there's a long history of it being rewritten," he says. "It has become
increasingly difficult to change the code because of the complexity and
the attrition of the knowledge base that wrote it." That's a big problem
because laws that govern farm programs change every year, driving a need
to update the code to reflect those changes. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Gwinn hired consultants from IBM, who concluded that
rewriting the programs in a different language or rehosting them on a
distributed computing platform would be complicated and costly. But the
System/36 hardware had to go, so Gwinn decided to bite the bullet: FSA
will move off of its end-of-life mainframe systems by rewriting some of
the code in Java and replacing the rest with packaged software from SAP.
</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But Gwinn says he'll miss Cobol. "It has been very
stable and consistent, with little breakage due to code changes, which you
see with Java-based changes," he says. "And in a distributed environment
you have to balance your workloads a little more carefully."</FONT>
<div><FONT size=4><B>Going for a rewrite</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>The anticipated exit of institutional knowledge and
shortage of Cobol programmers were also primary drivers behind NYSE
Euronext's decision to reengineer 1 million lines of Cobol on a mainframe
that ran the stock exchange's post-trade systems. While Cobol was
dependable, it wasn't viewed as maintainable in the long run. </FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972219><FONT size=3>If your organization
doesn't use Cobol, why not? (Multiple responses allowed.)</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=3>Cobol is an outdated language - 49%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>We no
longer have mainframes/We have discontinued Cobol - 42%</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=3>Cobol is an inferior language compared to the ones we use -
35%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Lack of Cobol skills in-house or in the labor
market - 22%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Our enterprise is too small to have
Cobol applications - 21%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Our enterprise is too new
to have Cobol applications - 21%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Base: 77</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Steven Hirsch, chief architect and chief data officer,
cites the need to make changes very rapidly as another key reason the NYSE
abandoned Cobol. "Ultimately, the code was not easily changeable in terms
of what the business needed to move forward. We were pushing the envelope
of what it took to scale the Cobol environment," he says. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>So NYSE rewrote Cobol programs that run its post-trade
systems for Ab Initio, a parallel-processing platform that runs under
Linux on high-end Hewlett-Packard DL580 servers. The new environment
allows for more rapid development, and the rewrite also eliminated a
substantial amount of unnecessary and redundant code that had crept into
the original Cobol programs over the years.</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972227><BR><FONT size=3>If the business'
Cobol code doesn't need to change much, and many batch and transaction
processing programs don't, it can be maintained on or off of the mainframe
indefinitely. But that philosophy wouldn't work for NYSE. "We are a
rapidly changing business and we needed to move faster than our legacy
code," Hirsch says. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>As for trading, that's all proprietary NYSE Euronext
software. "There's no Big Iron or Cobol," Hirsch explains. "There's been
no use of mainframes in the trading environment for many years."</FONT>
<div><FONT size=4><B>Rehosting: Lift and shift</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>When it comes to hiring new Cobol programmers, Jonathan
J. Miller, director of information systems and services for Saginaw
County, Michigan, is struggling. "We've lost our systems programming
staff," he says. And like many government IT organizations that have
suffered from budget cuts, he doesn't have much to offer those in-demand
Cobol programmers. </FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972229><FONT size=3>What's your
organization's interest in outsourcing Cobol <I>maintenance</I>, either
onshore or offshore?</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Not interested - 73%</FONT>
<BR><FONT size=3>Currently outsourcing - 18%</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=3>Interested - 8%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Base: 131</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Generous government benefits used to attract candidates
even when salaries were lower than in private business. Now, he says, "Our
pay hasn't increased in eight years and benefits are diminished." To fill
in the gap, the county has been forced to contract with retired employees
and outsource Cobol maintenance and support to a third party -- something
that just 18% of Computerworld readers say they are doing today. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>The Cobol brain drain is starting to become critical for
many government organizations, says Garza. "It's a high risk problem in
many countries we are doing work in. The people have retired. Even the
managers are gone. There's no one to talk to."</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Saginaw County found itself hemmed in by the complexity
of its Cobol infrastructure. It has four million lines of highly
integrated Cobol programs that run everything from the prosecutor's office
to payroll on a 46 MIPS Z9 series mainframe that is at end of life. With
mainframe maintenance costs rising 10% to 20% each year, the county needs
to get off the platform quickly. </FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972234><FONT size=3>What's your
organization's interest in outsourcing Cobol <I>development</I>, either
onshore or offshore?</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Not interested - 81%</FONT>
<BR><FONT size=3>Currently outsourcing - 12%</FONT> <BR><FONT
size=3>Interested - 7%</FONT> <BR><FONT size=3>Base: 131</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But commercial software packages lack the level of
integration users expect, and Miller's team doesn't have the time and
resources to do a lot of integration work or reengineer all of the program
code for another platform. </FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972239><FONT size=3>So the county is
starting a multi-phase project to recompile the code with Micro Focus
Visual Cobol and re-host it on Windows servers. An associated VSAM
database will also be migrated to SQL Server. Miller hopes that the more
modern graphical development suite will make the Cobol programming
position, which has gone unfilled for two years, more attractive to
prospective programmers. But he acknowledges that finding talent will
still be an uphill battle. </FONT><BR><BR><FONT size=4><B>A legacy
continues</B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Is there a role for Cobol off the mainframe? "I don't
believe there is. Cobol and the mainframe run well together, and that's
where I want to keep it," BNY Mellon's Brown says. But the bank is still
creating new Cobol components on the mainframe, and will continue to do
so. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>That's a common sentiment among Accenture's large
corporate customers, says Burden. Cobol will continue its gradual decline
as midrange systems are retired and businesses continue to modernize
legacy Cobol code or move to packaged software. Today Cobol is no longer
the strategic language on which the business builds new applications. But
it still represents the "family jewels" of business, Burden says. "They're
enhancing existing applications and adding functionality to them. I've
seen no slowdown in those activities."</FONT>
<div><IMG alt=Cobol src="cid:1.2995230736 at web160601.mail.bf1.yahoo.com"
width=120 height=120>
<div><FONT size=3>If companies can't find talent to keep that
infrastructure going, outsourcing firms such as Accenture are ready, says
Burden. The scale of Accenture's support operation is large enough to
provide a career track for Cobol programmers, and he says it's easy to
cross-train programmers on the language. "We can turn out new programmers
quickly. So if clients can't support Cobol, we will." </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"People make too much of that trend that we're not
graduating enough Cobol programmers," says IBM's Stoodley. Preserving the
institutional knowledge is what's critical. "You can make a problem for
yourself if you don't keep your team vibrant," he says. But as long as
there's a demand for it, "businesses will find people willing to work on
Cobol." </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"You have to respect the architecture of Cobol," Burden
says. It may have been created for simpler times in application
development, but it remains the bedrock of many IT infrastructures. "I
don't see that changing for another 10 years, or even longer."</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3><B>SIDEBAR: Closing the Cobol talent gap </B></FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Where do you find Cobol programmers these days? College
graduates with training in Cobol are in short supply. In Michigan, for
example, state schools that offer Cobol programming have cancelled classes
due to a lack of interest. "They can't get anyone to enroll," says
Jonathan Miller, director of Saginaw County Information Systems and
Services. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>But some colleges are still providing Cobol training --
with help from IBM. The mainframe vendor </FONT><A
href="https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/systemz/schools.html"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>has developed
curricula</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> in association with more than 80
colleges and universities ranging from Brigham Young to Texas A&M. "We
donate hardware and software, help with the curriculum, and they graduate
hundreds of people every year," says Kevin Stoodley, </FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137456/IBM_Update"
rel=nofollow target=_blank><FONT color=blue
size=3><U>IBM</U></FONT></A><FONT size=3> fellow and chief technology
officer.</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>The Guardian Life Insurance Co. has recruited Cobol
programmers from Workforce Opportunity Services, a nonprofit that
collaborates with business clients and local colleges to train
economically disadvantaged students to fill less popular technology
disciplines such as Cobol programming. "They take kids from disadvantaged
neighborhoods and provide them as consultants," says former Guardian CIO
Frank Wander, who now has his own consultancy, IT Excellence Institute.
</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>"It's sort of a work/study program. We have over 200
consultants today in five states, and we're expanding," says Workforce
founder Art Langer. </FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>BNY Mellon and many other organizations also
increasingly rely on </FONT><A
href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/topic/60/Outsourcing" rel=nofollow
target=_blank><FONT color=blue size=3><U>outsourcing</U></FONT></A><FONT
size=3> firms to pick up maintenance and support duties. But for many
customers with mission-critical applications, offshore is not the place to
keep the institutional knowledge of the business rules that is behind that
code. David Brown, managing director of BNY Mellon's IT transformation
group, says the bank wants those skills in house.</FONT>
<div><FONT size=3>Fortunately, it's not all that difficult to cross-train
programmers in Cobol. "Right now it's pretty easy to hire programmers, and
if they understand Java I can bring them back to procedural languages like
Cobol," Brown says. The trick, he says, is to develop a curriculum that
teaches not just Cobol, but the business rules behind the code that runs
the company. "We need to make sure we can roll that forward."</FONT>
<div id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972244><FONT size=3><I>- Robert L.
Mitchell</I></FONT><FONT id=yui_3_2_0_17_1331997065972242 size=2
face=sans-serif><BR></FONT><BR>The information contained in this e-mail,
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