I wish the press and experts would be a little more precise and stop using the word "system." To most people, system means hardware. To the extent there is a problem, hardware is not (usually) the problem, so it's grossly misleading to suggest otherwise. How about, "poorly structured application code"?
There's a comment later in the article which resonates with me more than the others, about scapegoating. How refreshing it would be for management to say, "Well, we blew it. We didn't test long enough, and for years we underinvested in trying to make sure our application code is well structured to reduce the testing burden. We also neglected the needs of our AD staff and didn't provide them with the tools and resources to modernize and improve our code portfolio over these past several years. That's why, starting today, we're aggressively addressing this specific problem by spending a little bit of money to save a lot more." Or at least scapegoat Wall Street, which doesn't particularly value ongoing investments in application code that's "working" -- or indeed investments in much of anything -- when there's a quarterly profit number to hit. Last week I met a customer that, in round numbers, has a decision whether to spend about $50 million to restructure their application code or about $1 billion to scrap the whole thing and rewrite from scratch (with high risk). They don't have one billion dollars. Fortunately the $50 million -- less than two bucks per line -- should result in code that's easy to enhance and to test, well documented, accessible (through new channels), high performance, and business functional. It happens to be COBOL. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
