Look behind the scenes of any slick mobile application or commercial interface, and deep beneath the integration and service layers of any major enterprise’s application architecture, you will likely find mainframes running the show.
Critical applications and systems of record are using these core systems as part of a hybrid infrastructure. Any interruption in their ongoing operation could be disastrous to the continued operational integrity of the business. So much so that many companies are afraid to make substantive changes to them.
But change is inevitable, as technical debt is piling up. To achieve business agility and keep up with competitive challenges and customer demand, companies must absolutely modernize these applications. Instead of putting off change, leaders should seek new ways to accelerate digital transformation in their hybrid strategy.
Don’t blame COBOL for modernization delays
The biggest obstacle to mainframe modernization is probably a talent crunch. Many of the mainframe and application experts who created and appended enterprise COBOL codebases over the years have likely either moved on or are retiring soon.
Scarier still, the next generation of talent will be hard to recruit, as newer computer science graduates who learned Java and newer languages won’t naturally picture themselves doing mainframe application development. For them, the work may not seem as sexy as mobile app design or as agile as cloud native development. In many ways, this is a rather unfair predisposition.
COBOL was created way before object orientation was even a thing—much less service orientation or cloud computing. With a lean set of commands, it shouldn’t be a complicated language for newer developers to learn or understand. And there’s no reason why mainframe applications wouldn’t benefit from agile development and smaller, incremental releases within a DevOps-style automated pipeline.
Figuring out what different teams have done with COBOL over the years is what makes it so hard to manage change. Developers made endless additions and logical loops to a procedural system that must be checked out and updated as a whole, rather than as components or loosely coupled services.
