On Mar 28, 2017, at 2:45 PM, Edward Gould <edgould1...@comcast.net> wrote: > > I thought politics were a NONO on the list?
The article wasn’t particularly political, mostly just “a new administration wants to upgrade Federal IT, just like all the ones before it said they would do.” This part was interesting: Trump has not said how much he is willing to spend on this. The U.S. House of Representatives approved bipartisan legislation last year, the "Modernizing Government Technology Act of 2016," that would have cost the government $9 billion over a four-year period -- if the bill had made it into law. It was not taken up in the Senate. The House approved that funding after the Oversight and Government Reform Committee last year held a Cobol-bashing hearing. The committee, in building support for modernizing federal IT, pointed out that there were at least 3,500 federal IT employees at work to maintain "legacy" languages, including 1,100 employees dedicated to Cobol. The committee made Cobol sound like a bad thing, which really upset Chris O'Malley, the president and CEO of Compuware. "Cobol is this code word for throwing disdain toward the mainframe platform," said O'Malley. In response, O'Malley did something he hadn't done before: He started contacting lawmakers and telling them about the virtues of Cobol in transaction processing. And they listened. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who heads the powerful House oversight committee, took O'Malley up on a invitation to visit Compuware's office in Detroit. He was shown how the company's Cobol mainframe environments function as modern platforms that support multifactor authentication and encryption, and were developed in an Agile environment using DevOps tools. O'Malley showed Chaffetz the developers at work. "They see a working environment that looks exactly like Amazon (Web Services) and we're doing it in the mainframe," he said. "If you have code that works and works well, that is like gold -- you do not want to throw that away." Shawn McCarthy, an analyst at IDC, said that some of the government's legacy systems "were built really well and continue to function really well. That's not a reason to get rid of it.” -- Pew, Curtis G curtis....@austin.utexas.edu ITS Systems/Core/Administrative Services ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
