Why the Information Technology Management Curriculum

When first reviewing the Module Topic question at first glance I was for the latter and felt that COBOL should not be part of the Information Technology curriculum but after doing my research I have to whole heartedly state that COBOL should definitely be part of the curriculum. Being an IT Professional for the past 11 year I have mainly focused my career as a Technician and as a Systems Administrator never really having the reason to investigate the programming side of the house so my knowledge has been lean on the subject matter of what types of programming languages were out. Reading through the course materials and various articles, I have definitely opened my eye to the need for COBOL education. It is no surprise that in today's day and age COBOL is not the preferred choice when choosing a language to code in. There are many other fancier and robust programs to choose from but nothing has stood the test of time like COBOL.

COBOL was created in 1959 and is one of the oldest computer languages still in use today and most people do not realize that without COBOL, most of our daily activities would come to a screeching halt. The question of why COBOL should or shouldn't be included within the Information Technology Management course should not even a consideration. Since the birth of COBOL over 50 years ago it had truly stood the test of time and has even evolved into a trusted language that is widely used throughout the world.

"Banks have always been heavy users of technology, but they are also strong believers in the old maxim, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" (www.bankingtech.com December 2, 2011). There is a growing concern that faces the banking industry with still having "legacy" systems in place that should have probably upgrade to a more manageable system and language that the majority of coders use today. The major dilemma for the majority of the world including the banking, insurance and even government agencies is that they are all still running on what is said to be "legacy" systems and we are at the point where "the people who know how to code in COBOL are disappearing as they reach retirement age." (CIOs Seek Ways to Replace Legacy Systems - www.ciozone.com/index.php/Government-IT - No date provided).

Organizations are faced with the growing fact that COBOL programmers are fading away and with the countess lines of code still running our major industries back-end they are faced with the problem of not having the proper staffing to handle the demand, the cost of outsourcing work which would be considerable and the horror or modernizing an entire infrastructure at once which is virtually impossible. For Example, if an organization which runs mainly on COBOL decided to upgrade their entire infrastructure there would be a mass confusion by just the end users alone. Organizations would wind up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the upgrade and training alone which could prove detrimental to the organization as s whole. With change comes growing pains and depending on the pace of the organization whether it is banking or government this could cause tremendous issue with productivity and could even cripple the organization all together. Too much emphasis is placed on the "shiny new ball" when we should be in sync with what we need verses what we want.

From the outside looking in, it would seem logical to keep the teachings of COBOL within the IT curriculum considering that this is where what seems like all of the computer language that we use today had come from. It would seem that since that since the IT world is such a diverse field you should not count something just because it is old and something new and flashy comes along.

I was talking with a few of my coworkers the other day and they had asked me how my classes were going. I started to talk about this topic and they looked at me in amazement since they had not heard the word COBOL in many years. I relayed to them what I had researched and explained that it is still widely used today even in the ATM machine that one of them just came back from. We talked for about 20 minutes and in the end I had opened their eyes to the fact that COBOL was not dead, but very much alive. In my line of work I deal with developers and programmers on a regular basis and I found it funny that none of them even knew or where taught how to code in COBOL. Would you teach a Social Studies course without the history portion of it? In order to truly know how to code in the current computer language it is important