Today, hundreds of billions of lines of legacy code represent more than 80% of all software in active use throughout the United States. This enormous code base runs critical operations for our nation’s businesses, government agencies and organizations.
In my latest blog series, I have focused on the risks posed by our aging legacy applications. At this point some background may be helpful.
For decades, Enterprise system developers analyzed the essential operations of their respective organizations, and designed, developed and perfected software that automated and supported those critical functions. Their efforts produced corporate America’s most valuable asset - systems that codify and facilitate strategic procedures and policies that deliver productivity and competitive advantage to the corporations and governments they support. These legacy applications have successfully supported our nation’s critical operations for many decades and our government agencies and corporations cannot operate without them.
Ironically, the reliability and stability of these critical systems has led to appalling complacency on the part of the beneficiaries of these indispensable legacy applications. Long term neglect has undermined the effectiveness of those assets to deliver productivity and competitive advantage to the corporations and governments that depend on them.
Furthermore, the marginalization of these critical systems, their developers and the indispensable value they provide to our economy has quashed the allure of pursuing education, training and careers in developing and supporting legacy systems.
Presently, there is a perilous shortage of developers with proficiency in these legacy programming languages. The average age of a legacy programmer today is at or near retirement age. Though experts estimate that there are 250 billion lines of COBOL code actively deployed today, there are not enough COBOL programmers to adequately maintain those systems. RPG, the primary programming language of IBM’s AS/400 – IBMi platform has not been offered in colleges and universities for more than 15 years.
Corporate America’s greatest asset is now also its greatest weakness. As I mentioned in my last blog, the current pandemic has exposed the inability of our state’s unemployment agencies to quickly adapt the legacy systems to address the urgent need to provide Americans with Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) under the CARES Act. Which legacy application will be tested and exposed next? What vital need will be denied because of the aging system? What if a crucial legacy application fails? How will the organization operate without it? What will happen when the last legacy programmer retires?
It is no longer a question of “if” but of “when” we will suffer a breakdown of our declining enterprise technology infrastructure. Crises of this magnitude cannot be solved overnight. Therefore, the contingency plans of every government agency and corporation in America must address and obviate these risks as soon as possible. Next week's blog will address the possible ways this can be done.
ETS can help you make the transformation https://www.etsassociates.com/contact-us.
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