Finding Solutions to a Fading IT Workforce
Insurance Networking News, February 1, 2008
You’ve heard the phrase, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Can the same be said for “new dogs?” Insurers are finding that in the context of IT staff, those “new dogs” coming out of academia want less to do with the old tricks of programming legacy systems—yet the holes they are trying to fill as these “legacy workers” retire require just that.
Like most vertical markets, the insurance industry’s IT attrition issues are commonplace. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, one million IT jobs will be unfilled by 2012, chiefly because there is not enough qualified, trained human capital to fill them. In the United States, enrollment in undergraduate computer programming disciplines has declined 70% in the last five years, says Robert Horton, coordinator of the management computer systems program for the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.
Robert Horton
Advertisement
“We are calling it a general IT workforce development crisis,” he says. “Largely a reaction to the setbacks associated with careers that crashed during the dot.com bust, the myths that IT careers are not ‘creative,’ and the fear that jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing, parents and counselors are advising kids not to choose computer science.”
Yet insurance companies face a unique dilemma—one that lends itself to the falling off of a specific breed of IT—those versed in legacy systems. As business demands escalate and IT teams are charged with doing more with less, decisions must be made when these knowledge workers retire. Whether a carrier decides to rip and replace its legacy systems, or find a creative way to meet those needs with existing systems, challenges ensue.
Some argue that to be progressive, IT departments need to move away from older legacy systems, and train their developers and programmers in the newer languages such as SQL, Java or C# (pronounced C-sharp). Still others are adopting an “if it ain’t broke” philosophy, choosing to hold on to systems that continue to successfully manage large volumes of data and reliably churn out complex transaction sets.
One thing is a constant: change. As IT workers trained in legacy languages, such as COBOL, depart for their second careers (away from IT) and the vendors supporting those systems create new offerings that offer less on the mainframe and more integration with newer systems, carriers are finding themselves at a crossroads.
HIGH STAKES
More than 45% of survey respondents answering a recent Insurancenetworking.com poll cited heavy reliance on IT developers who manage and maintain COBOL-based legacy applications, while 36% reported marginal reliance. Only 18% of poll respondents reported having no reliance on IT personnel with COBOL knowledge.
Reliance on languages such as COBOL is understandable—the second-oldest high-level programming language (FORTRAN is the oldest), COBOL is still the most widely used programming language in the world. Its weakness is seen by many as its strength: The language is wordy, and programs written in COBOL tend to be much longer than the same programs written in other languages. But its wordiness makes it easy to understand programs because everything is spelled out, experts say.
Craig Lowenthal, CIO of NYMAGIC INC. and the MMO Group of Companies, a provider of ocean marine, energy and commercial property and casualty lines coverage, says COBOL has been a successful strategy—to date. As evidence, he points to carriers that choose to extend their legacy systems by creating a presentation layer that can function over the older system.
“During the last five-plus years, companies have been building new interfaces that can handle XML transactions so they can keep their COBOL at the back end,” he says. “So the attitude is: ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ The screens may not look great, but why build a new system? So if the system works, and you have folks to write to it, great. Conversely, now you have the continuing evolution of the Web and an aging workforce. Over the next five years, many people who hung on to those beliefs will be forced to move and change because they can’t sustain it and function as effectively.”
For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:
