> a large contingent of people who essentially do manual data copying
Yup.
I was briefly part of a decades long effort to migrate off a main frame backend. It was basically a very expensive shared flat file database (eg FileMaker Pro). Used by thousands of applications, neither inventoried or managed. Surely a handful were critical for daily operations, but no one remembered which ones.
And the source data (quality) was filthy.
I suggested we pay some students to manually copy just the bits of data our spiffy "modern" apps needed.
No one was amused.
--
I also suggested we find a suitable COBOL runtime and just forklift the mainframe's "critical" infra into a virtual machine.
No one was amused.
Lastly, I suggested we throttle access to every unidentified mainframe client. Progressively making it slower over time. Surely we'd hear about anything critical breaking.
Yup.
I was briefly part of a decades long effort to migrate off a main frame backend. It was basically a very expensive shared flat file database (eg FileMaker Pro). Used by thousands of applications, neither inventoried or managed. Surely a handful were critical for daily operations, but no one remembered which ones.
And the source data (quality) was filthy.
I suggested we pay some students to manually copy just the bits of data our spiffy "modern" apps needed.
No one was amused.
--
I also suggested we find a suitable COBOL runtime and just forklift the mainframe's "critical" infra into a virtual machine.
No one was amused.
Lastly, I suggested we throttle access to every unidentified mainframe client. Progressively making it slower over time. Surely we'd hear about anything critical breaking.
That suggestion flew like a lead zeppelin.