On a table in my office, I have an circa 1945 Royal typewriter. It belonged to my father. I typed “poetry” on it in elementary school. I typed papers on it in high school about the time desktops like the Commodore came on the scene. I appropriated the old machine and carried it around the country for nearly a quarter-century in the Army. When I retired, I refurbished it. It still smells great. It still works. It sits beside an HP printer. If it’s not a luddistic critique of one sort or another, then it’s a simple reminder of how far we’ve come.
How far some have come, anyway.
ANTIQUATED IT
Hard to believe (but true), the Federal Government of the greatest, most powerful, most innovative, most etc., etc., etc. nation in the history of mankind functions on some IT systems dating back to the mid-1980s, or before. There are some government employees conducting business on machines running on COBOL. Yes, COBOL.
No, COBOL is not a new name for a shade of blue. COBOL is Common Business-Oriented Language, a dead computer language dating back to the late 1950s. COBOL was designed by CODASYL, the Committee on Data Systems Languages. That committee represented some of the most advanced thinking on data processing back when assembly lines were cranking out that Royal sitting across from me. CODASYL’s job, standardize data processing language. They gave the Department of Defense, and the world, COBOL. What a great investment. Seriously.
Some in government are still using COBOL for financial management. I guess that’s why we’re spending about $63 billion of our $82 billion FY2017 Federal IT dollars on legacy (a nice way of saying antiquated) systems. Nearly 80 percent is helping keep us antiquated.
A MODERNIZATION INITIATIVE
To not enough fanfare, then (perhaps because we’re embarrassed), the Federal CIO Tony Scott last Thursday released for public comment the President’s proposed guidance for our government’s Information Technology Modernization Initiative (ITMI). The Modernization Initiative is about as efficiently, effectively, and quickly as possible spending $3.1 billion to bring the Federal Government’s information technology foundations into the second decade of the 21st century.
Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Tony Scott argues that the United States is “dominant in today’s digital age,” but he acknowledges that “Federal departments and agencies rely on aging computer systems and networks running on outdated hardware and infrastructure that are expensive to operate and difficult to defend against modern cyber threats.” (Like COBOL.)
The ITMI “establishes a series of actions for Federal agencies to identify and prioritize IT systems in need of upgrades” that directs agencies to advance to the present, and future, in four phases: development of updated Enterprise Roadmaps, identification and prioritization of systems, development of modernization profiles for high-priority systems, and execution.
Scott concludes, “Moving the Federal Government to modern infrastructure, such as cloud-based solutions, is a fundamental necessity to building a digital government that is responsive to citizen needs and secure by design.”
PUBLIC COMMENT
You have a say in how the nation rockets into its IT future, and you’ve got 30 days to do it (that’s the window for public comment on ITMI). The clock started ticking last Thursday.
Oh, yeah, GO CUBS! A grand slam! Wow. That’s baseball.
