Modern Legacy

COBOL and legacy systems often represent the core of businesses’ critical processes. That means that businesses tend to rely strongly on these systems, without which they could not deliver their day-to-day activities or create value for their customers. These systems have grown over decades, are deeply integrated, and extremely stable. The problem: there are fewer and fewer COBOL developers around who can maintain these systems. Many experts are retiring and there is little new talent. Unsurprisingly, universities and colleges focus their courses on more modern programming languages and technologies. In turn, that means that young IT talent rarely experiences COBOL during their education.

This skills shortage has consequences:

    • High degree of dependence on a few key members of staff: in many cases it is just a few members of staff who holds complex knowledge of legacy systems. If one of these people becomes unavailable, significant problems can easily occur.
    • Increased risks in case of system outages: a lack of maintenance staff who can resolve issues makes longer outages more likely when technical issues occur.
    • Challenges for development and modernisation work: implementing new functions or integrating existing with modern systems becomes harder because of a lack of subject matter know-how that is necessary to adjust legacy systems.
    • High costs associated with external consultants: often, businesses have no other choice but to hire expensive external COBOL specialists to maintain operations.
Strategies available to overcome skills shortages

To meet the challenges related to COBOL and legacy resources businesses can adopt a number of startegies:

    • Know-how management and transfer:
      • Documentation: good, extensive documentation of existing knowledge relating to legacy systems is imperative. Documentation should encompass architecture, interfaces, business logic, and error resolution processes.
      • Mentoring programmes: experienced COBOL developers should actively pass on their know-how to younger colleagues. It can be highly effective to do this through programmes in which new talent is trained by experienced team members.
      • Internal training: regular internal training on specific legacy systems and COBOL contributes to spreading know-how more widely within the business.
    • Attracting and developing talent:
      • Niche recruitment: targeted search for COBOL developers, even if there are few of them. Such a search should include lateral hires who have relevant logic experience and who can be trained in COBOL.
      • Developing young talent: businesses can set up their own COBOL training programmes for young talent, either internally or through partnerships with further education providers.
      • Attractive employment terms: to retain the few available COBOL specialists, businesses should create attractive terms of employment, offer development and learning opportunities, and foster a positive work-life balance.
    • Modernisation and transformation:
      • Modern compiler technologies: modern COBOL compiler technologies produce Java or .NET classes and support easy integration into the relevant ecosystems. This allows for existing business logic to be seamlessly used within modern web applications or web services.
      • Use of modern development environments: modern, integrated development environments based on Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and others offer all the potential inherent in modern software development – also for COBOL. These tried and tested environments help experienced developers with a background in Java or .NET to familiarise themselves with COBOL.
      • Iterative modernisiation: not all legacy systems require complete re-development instantly. Chosing an iterative modernisation approach in which individual components or modules are modernised, one after the other, can reduce pressures and ease the transition.
Summary

Lack of COBOL experts and antiquated IT systems don’t mean you’re stuck with what you have. By drawing on and fully utilising existing potential within your teams, through targeted recruitment, and with iterative, ongoing application modernisation you can take the necessary steps to stay ahead. EasiRun can support you as a partner on this journey with consultancy, modernisation services, and technologies.