And save time, costs, company resources. How?

When you write complex applications, with millions and millions of lines of code, splitted in hundreds or thousands of programs. added to others that are equally complex and layered over time, may be written in a different language or tool, knowing exactly what resides in the mainframe becomes mission close to be impossible. Research from Microsoft found that COBOL developers spend up to 80% of their time identifying problematic code, thus severely limiting the rest of their activities. 

When COBOL developers change roles, companies, or retire, companies experience a loss of historical memory. Even when they are still in their role that deep and important knowledge is not easily shared at any company level. So, when necessary, developers tend to solve problems by finding alternative solutions, with a waste of time, resources, and costs. Solutions, in the best situation, in which they simply overlap new layers of code and create cumbersome and heavy applications that even the most experienced developers struggle to understand. They are therefore limited to making only optimization changes on legacy COBOL applications for fear of damaging applications that are not understood or not fully known.

But how much does this cost to companies?

The cost of maintaining such a situation is extremely high. In general, Banks, Insurances, Public Administration, and large corporations – these are the companies that still maintain mainframe-based systems – are reluctant to change their applications COBOL because they realize that the risk is high. Sometimes they therefore prefer to shoulder the higher costs or pay tickets for non-compliance, rather than making code changes that could stop applications and crash their systems.

Only an automatic Reversal Data Lineage solution can address COBOL’s issues!

Reversal Data Lineage is defined as a kind of data lifecycle as it states where data is coming from; where it is going; what transformations (rules) are applied as it flows multiple processes, at maximum depth level: Column level. It helps reply to simple but fundamental questions like: “Where did you get the data set to calculate EBITA and which transformation rules have been applied?”

Getting full lineage of how data was created, what it means, and how has been transformed, companies will unleash the full potential of their metadata re-gaining the knowledge and control of IT physical systems, embracing all their COBOL applications.

The core of our iGovernance Suite is a set of ready-to-go Metadata Catchers able to retrieve the complete knowledge of the IT physical processes described in the most common tools (IBM DataStage, Informatica Powercenter, Talend, etc.) and languages (COBOL, SQL, PL / SQL, Java, etc.), to support company’s data-driven strategy and ensure the highest quality and governance for the organization’s data.

Thanks to our iGovernance Suite Metadata Catcher for COBOL, it will be possible to immediately identify the part of the code that needs to be verified or if that application needs to be discontinued or not. Hence regaining the full knowledge of the processes and applications running on the mainframe, generating incredible savings in time, resources, and management costs.

Then the Data Lineage resulted can be loaded into Customer’s Metadata Repository or tools like IBM BPM, Informatica Axon, Collibra, SAS, etc. at the depth level requested by business to complete their Data Governance view, while the most deep and complete is still available in iGovernance Suite ready to be used by IT to solve their daily criticalities or job.