Overview: In a post-pandemic world, government agencies must ensure their resiliency by using lessons learned to prepare for the future. Key to this effort are the assessment of systems and their currency, with a focus on infrastructure scalability so employees can do the same level of work whether at home or in the office.

noun: resiliency
1. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity

Leaders all over the world are in the process of looking to the future. We are all thinking together that we will return to normal, but we must admit to one another that we are not sure what that new normal will be. For one thing, it should give us a moment to catch our breath. To relish the time we have when we are together, and to prepare for the real possibility that another wave of the pandemic—or anything catastrophic, for that matter—could knock us down again. What do I think is our new norm? Resiliency.

For those of us in the IT world, that means we need to focus on making sure our technology infrastructure is scalable, and that our teams are empowered with best-of breed-technologies that enable them to work seamlessly from the office or their home. In private industry, we do that regularly. In government? Hopefully, it has been proven that we must do just that.

Reshaping Strategic Initiatives

Begin by doing a hard assessment. Listen to your teams as they return to work and share their successes, but also point to where improvements must be made. Identify mechanisms to measure across all platforms. Every asset still accessed today either by your internal teams or your external agencies or citizens is a critical asset. Every. One. Of. Them. No longer can a responsible CIO or CTO make a statement that a platform or service is not part of their strategic plan. Even if the citizen service is in the queue to be upgraded, that system and every component of that system must be funded at a production level, staffed at a production level and maintained at a production level.

Timely, accurate data is essential to your assessment. Products like Compuware zAdviser help analyze data, create benchmarks, and find correlations between developer behavior and meaningful KPIs. This continuous measurement and improvement of software delivery quality, velocity and efficiency will help to ensure that your time, effort and spending are going to where they are best utilized.

Currency

Identify the currency of the systems over which you are responsible. Currency means that throughout your organization, from your desktop operating system to your mainframe, you adopt a software and operating system standard—and you enforce it. Release levels are critical. If you do not have a published cycle, it is time to adopt one.

Critical Infrastructure

Trends are a funny thing. When I was a new member of the National Association of Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) in the early 2000s, I noticed I was missing something in my technology strategy as the CTO of Arkansas: a brand-new shiny data center. Every state report would indicate a new data center project. My state? We needed one, but we are a balanced budget state. We waited until we received an offer we could not refuse.

Fast forward to today in national public sector organizations. I represent an amazing mainframe software company. Yes, that is right: mainframe. I lose count of the number of CIOs in the past who indicated the mainframe is not a strategic platform. Really? When you have a citizen service running on a platform, that platform is an essential component of your critical infrastructure. If you choose not to maintain it or fund it, your citizens suffer, and the world takes note.

Empower your teams with modernized tools that work as well in the state office as they do in the home office. Compuware’s Topaz suite of tools provide mainframe development and testing capabilities that empower developers whether they’re seasoned veterans or new to the industry. Topaz on AWS allows secure, quick access to these powerful tools wherever the developer may be.

Similarly, Strobe application performance monitoring is available in a browser-based version, allowing remote access to reporting and analysis of CPU resources, usage, and source code.

Resiliency

The simple definition of resiliency is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.”

Toughness. We must work together and build together—and recover together. Through the COVID-19 pandemic we have learned areas that worked well and people we could depend upon to step up and provide us exactly what we needed. As the nation reopens and the world begins to return to pre-pandemic levels of operations, know that we all stand ready to learn from the past and quickly build up our scalability and be prepared for the next wave of threats, whatever they may be and whenever they arrive.

Overview: A failure to maintain systems and keep them scalable eventually causes them to become obsolete. “True technologists” understand this and keep their systems up-to-date and relevant by valuing team members, ensuring that systems can be scaled when needed, and keeping systems, training, and personnel up to date.

The COVID-19 global crisis continues to impact every segment of the world, and last week a very bright spotlight was cast upon states’ citizen services. It started when a governor erroneously blamed COBOL, actually “COBALT,” for his state failing to provide efficient access to unemployment systems. And then, suddenly, #COBOL was trending on Twitter.

How does a system become obsolete? By failing to maintain it each and every day. Following some discussions with government leaders, I was moved to coin the term “true technologist” to describe an inspiring group of professionals who have risen above the blame and the accusations we’ve seen play out this week. They are not saying they did not have time to plan and prepare, nor do they engage in the blame game that decides there is a single failure point when a system receives millions of requests at one time. Planning for seamless, scalable environments happens day in and day out in the private sector. And through coordinated emergency management drills, they do the same at the state level. Except some states missed one component of successful mitigation risk and emergency planning: ensuring every component of their critical infrastructure is maintained and scalable. I detail below the essential components of a critical infrastructure and how true technologists support each of them.

True Technologists in Action

People: The most critical component in government today is the people who keep it running every day, no matter what. They have nicknamed themselves the “WeBe’s…we be there when you get here…we be there when you’re gone.” When I first heard this, I thought it was a slam against me as a leader. Then I realized they are right. They survived multiple CTOs and reorganizations, audits and legislative changes. But at the end of the day, they are the glue. When I served as CTO for the State of Arkansas, partners would come and market their latest technologies to me. My response was a simple one: If my team needs it to do their jobs and it helps them with their technology efforts, they will bring me their recommendation for your product. True technologists value their team members.

Processes: I watched a news report on the distribution of paper applications for unemployment in Miami, Florida. Masses of people were grabbing forms…and you guessed it…there was no social distancing. What process was being reported on? How do I file for unemployment when systems are unavailable? The Governor of Florida had a logical response: these are unprecedented times and our systems are overwhelmed. And, then Florida began hiring personnel to process the claims. And their platform? It isn’t a mainframe. They ordered 72 servers to meet the increased demand. Other states posted a simple message: If you are already receiving unemployment benefits, please call…and they named a specific time. They added a note that this will help those who had never filed for unemployment get through the increased volume of requests. And then, true technologists shored up their infrastructure rapidly to meet the increased demand, and they hired additional personnel to assist is the human component of reviewing claims for assistance.

Tools: When #COBOL began trending, everyone was quick to paint the picture of an old, decrepit programmer who was the only person with the keys to the Mainframe Kingdom. Not true. Remember how I directed my partners to sell to my teams who were actually using the products? Modernized tools are available today at BMC AMI DevX to demystify your code and increase your efficiency, velocity and quality for your citizen services. And if you have not identified your mainframe systems as critical infrastructure, and identified your technology teams as essential personnel, failures will occur. It will take time to address those failures. Citizen services will become unresponsive. True technologists have planned for staffing levels, trained personnel and kept training curriculum up to date, maintained systems at current release levels and continued to invest in modernization efforts across every critical infrastructure platform, including the mainframe.

What’s Next?

When we return to normal in the upcoming months, we will look back and analyze what we could have done better, and what we need to make sure never happens again. Let’s start making that list now. In the event of another global disaster, true technologists will know exactly where to look, what to do once they find their resources, what tools are needed for modernization, and how to make sure they are ready if the time comes. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to ensure your mainframe is on the list along with the technologists who support it. Those who program services to execute on it should be on the top of your list. It isn’t your grandmother’s COBOL; your mainframe is definitely not an archaic processor, and you don’t have to look for your programmers in retirement communities. Take a look at BMC AMI DevX’s average developer community, where recent college graduates make up 30% of our team.

There’s no place in this brave new world for apathetic public sector leaders with fixed mindsets. The COBOL leaders and mainframe technologists in the trenches will continue to make the world run every day no matter what.

Overview: COBOL may be 60 years old, but it is far from antiquated. The history and current uses of the language provide useful lessons for our own lives. COBOL has remained relevant, stayed current, and leveraged past successes to help make the mainframe an indispensable platform for business and government not only today, but for the foreseeable future.

In 2019, COBOL and I shared a milestone birthday—we both turned 60. Recently, I read an article about COBOL being antiquated. Really, since when did something become antiquated because it turned 60? After all, consider our leading politicians. So, I decided to take a look at what it means to be 60 and be recognized for everything that has brought you the knowledge to be the leader you are today.

Stay Relevant

Staying up to date is the most critical component of technology today; it allows you to avoid technical debt while continuing to provide the most resilient processing available. When I achieved my technology degree in 1984, I could have stayed frozen in time and never learned another thing in technology. But that approach would have definitely made me antiquated in today’s world. Fast forward to today; constant research and engagement with leading technologists and integrating with top technologies keeps me on the leading edge with my peers. But, my years in the industry have taught me valuable lessons…it’s about the citizen and about leveraging your resources to increase quality, velocity and efficiency.

“Shiny new technology may be fun at first, but we need to do what works and works well.”

How does my dear 60-year-old friend COBOL stay relevant? Take a look at the release history to see what new features—including Continuous Delivery—help COBOL stay relevant and harness the capabilities unleashed by the IBM z15.

Stay Current

I grew up in the ’70s. Ah, the fashion, the music, the cars… Even if I stayed relevant with my research and technology interactions today, it does nothing if I don’t apply what I learned. Currency is critical in technology. If you do not keep your systems and services up to date with today’s releases and apply today’s methodologies, guess what you are? Yep—antiquated. Mainframe programs should be optimized to meet the needs of the Digital Economy and the best way to optimize your COBOL programs is to migrate them to a newer version of COBOL. If you don’t you are missing out on new features and compile options.

Recently, I visited a customer who just five years ago was a state leader in information technology. Leadership changed and operations stood still. They were one operating system release behind and multiple releases behind in the software they purchased from multiple vendors. It was like going back in time, and yes, we have to fight that battle every day. If you do not stay current, you will quickly become irrelevant.

Leverage What Works

“We are not the 60-year-olds from our parents’ generation.”

We stay relevant and current. My day-to day-work includes visiting multiple states to attend events from speaking engagements to technology celebrations to networking with leaders from across governments. And yet I apply what I have learned from each and every one of my sixty years on this earth. It is a culmination of experiences and modifying what works… and eliminating what does not.

Going Forward

It sounds a little funny, but as medical technology continues to improve, who knows? After all, look at everything that has changed in my 60 years. I started this career just as PCs were first introduced to the market, and today my main access point for technology services is through my cell phone. But the mainframe is still behind the technology. In fact, looking at businesses worldwide, 92 of the top 100 banks, 23 of the 25 largest airlines, and the 10 largest insurers use the mainframe to process transactions. Overall, 80% of the world’s corporate data resides or originates on mainframes. I rely on industry experts to leverage what works best for their processing environment—and they tell me it’s the mainframe.

Sixty years old and antiquated? Take a look again and get those facts straight. COBOL is the most up-to-date programming language in the technology arena today, running on the most securable, highest processing capability zSeries platform on the market. Don’t believe me? Let’s do a quick video chat and debate that face-to-face. I’m ready whenever you are!