February 16, 2022

How banks should leverage the power of automation

Mainframes are widely considered the backbones of many global financial services firms because they deliver unparalleled security, stability, and processing power. From credit card payments and ATM transactions to loans and mortgages, mainframes are relied on by 44 of the top 50 banks to host core applications that deliver secure experiences based on real-time data analytics.

Phase Change President Steve Brothers recently penned an article for TechBullion.com titled, "Banking automation: How banks should leverage the power of automation," in which he examines how these critical mainframes systems also present modernization challenges.

Mainframe systems are complicated and require meticulous processes to continue providing core operational value. While they are fully capable of running newer applications and systems to create new products and revenue streams, their ongoing support and modernization are challenging.

Brothers believes automation and artificial intelligence (AI) could greatly assist banking firms in maintaining and enhancing their mainframes because the key to sustaining these systems is precisely identifying the functionality created by the source code that is intertwined throughout the system — and changing that behavior without unintended consequences. Using a new AI approach that's designed to sift through large quantities of code in the same way humans do, AI-powered tools can aid developers in their frequent search through the deluge of code to rapidly identify where they need to make a change.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

February 7, 2022

AI Powers the Future of Financial Services — Just Not in the Ways You Think

Phase Change President Steve Brothers was recently interviewed for an article in The Fintech Times that considers the role AI could soon play in the financial industry. The article, "Phase Change: AI Powers the Future of Financial Services — Just Not in the Ways You Think," examines how AI will help maintain the software that runs the global financial enterprises, as well as other mainframe-based industries.

AI is already utilized by financial-industry players to automate investments, insurance, trading, banking services, and risk management, primarily on mainframes originally developed in the 1960s. Mainframe computing systems provide high security; high-speed, high-volume transaction processing; and reliable uptime. However, they can be complicated to use and require constant maintenance. Plus, they struggle to evolve quickly enough to support the increasing number of banking services supported by cloud mobility and big data.

New AI technologies can soon be used to automate software maintenance by helping developers better comprehend the source code — and make changes rapidly and precisely. The programmers that developed and maintained these huge and complex systems are in high demand (and are paid like it) or aging out of the workforce, and the financial institutions that rely on them are scrambling to understand the codebases with less experienced developers.

Rather than relying on knowledge transfer protocols to pass along specialized domain and program knowledge, financial institutions can now deploy advanced AI-powered tools to automate the process of identifying specific code that requires attention, regardless of how entangled that code is throughout the system.

Read the entire article here.

Todd Erickson is a Technology Writer with Phase Change. You can reach him at [email protected].

February 24, 2021

Legacy system failures expose the application knowledge gap’s harmful risks

February 24, 2021

by Steve Brothers

Government system failures during the rush to provide public benefits to alleviate the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic publicly exposed the mainframe knowledge crisis that also threatens financial institutions, healthcare providers, and many other organizations foundational to the world economy.

Several states discovered the knowledge-gap’s potentially devastating consequences when waves of unemployment-claims poured into their systems as COVID-19 ravaged the economy in early 2020. The states’ unemployment computer systems crashed trying to process the deluge of claims using mainframes and decades-old programming languages.

But it wasn’t the mainframes or the legacy programming languages that failed, despite what you may have read. It was the lack of available expert programmers necessary to maintain and update these systems to handle the voluminous claims.

According to The Verge’s article, “Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows,” Colorado employed exactly one full-time programmer to maintain the state’s COBOL system prior to the pandemic. Back then, Colorado processed roughly 2,000 unemployment claims per week. In March and April 2020, that number rocketed to as high as 104,572 claims per week.

Now governments, non-profits, and private organizations are reviewing their systems’ strategies to learn from these mistakes. If your business relies on legacy systems, you probably should keep reading – and schedule some time with your IT people.

Mainframes are cornerstones

Legacy mainframe systems and software bedrock many of our most trusted institutions, including government services, finance and banking, healthcare, and insurance. In a substantial number of cases the expert developers that created and maintained these systems and software are retiring without a supporting workforce to replace them.

Besides the people that make your business run, your software is potentially the most important resource your organization has. Internal applications likely drive your employees' capabilities and productivity. Customer-facing programs attract new customers, close business deals, and increase revenue. New applications and features can open new markets and opportunities.

To maintain and improve your critical applications, your software team relies on individual engineers that developed an expert understanding of your programs through years of experience. They know the applications and all the accumulated system changes and challenges.

When those experienced engineers depart your business, the developers that replace them must acquire the same application knowledge through training, mentorship, and on-the-job programming. This exercise introduces several material business risks.

Learning on the job

Developers new to software applications typically require 6-12 months of on-the-job learning to become productive, depending on the size of the source code base. To become proficient, programmers may need up to 3 years.

Without qualified software developers knowledgeable about your applications, you endanger your business's operations, reputation, and security. You also risk a significant decrease in your software teams' productivity and efficiency.

Consider the monumental task confronting newly hired or transferred IRS developers last March. Congress passed the CARES Act on March 25, 2020, and then Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that individual stimulus checks would be mailed in early April.

To assist with the delivery of economic stimulus payments, the new developers were required to immediately start working with the agency's source code base, which, in 2019, was estimated at nearly 20 million lines of code and includes over 60 years of legislative and system changes. As of mid-May 2020, nearly 20 million people had not received their stimulus checks, and some recipients had problems throughout the year.

These engineers didn’t have 6-12 months to become productive. They had to hit the ground running on day one. And without the benefit of weeks or months of training and on-the-job learning, they didn’t have the application knowledge necessary to understand how even simple changes could affect entire applications.

And let's not forget the productivity loss due to the remaining IRS's experienced engineers for training, mentoring, and supervising the new recruits.

What’s your risk?

Your situation may not be as dire as what the IRS faced – for now. But how much time can you really give your new developers to learn the system, and how much productivity can you afford to lose while your experienced programmers train and supervise them?

How much do you trust the developers that have just started working on your critical applications?

How confident will you be when your CEO or Board of Directors asks for assurances that the next customer-facing application update will not result in outages and lost revenue – especially if the update was programmed by a developer you hired just weeks ago?

Your software is a critical part of your organization, especially if you rely on legacy mainframe systems. You must have a plan or tool that keeps the code running and bridges the gap between retiring and departing developers and the people that will replace them.

Steve Brothers is the President of Phase Change Software. You can reach him on LinkedIn or at [email protected].

April 10, 2017

Prevent software application knowledge from walking out the door – blog

April 10, 2017

by Todd Erickson, Tech Writer

Brain drain is a serious problem facing organizations that use software applications to run their businesses. Learn how you can seal the drain and retain all of the knowledge trapped in your applications.

At the end of every workday, your software development teams walk out the door with all of their knowledge leaving with them. Some of them don’t come back, and that loss of information and expertise, or brain drain, is a growing business problem, especially with IT industry turnover rates hovering between 20-30% annually.

Consider how much knowledge your organization loses when key members of your development team retire or join other companies. Not only do you lose development expertise, but the knowledge your engineers have regarding how your software applications work, such as:

  • How the system is architected
  • The subject-matter expertise used to implement functionality
  • The business considerations that drove product and feature designs
  • How third-party and external systems are integrated

The plight of developing and supporting older and large-scale applications is exacerbated when companies have to scramble to replace retiring software engineers with unqualified replacements. Multiple reports suggest that 10,000 Baby Boomers walk out the corporate door in the U.S. for good every day.

Many of these retirees are the software engineers that developed and maintain the many systems that still run on Cobol and other mainframe programming languages. The impact of losing thousands of mainframe engineers and their vast programming and business knowledge will be widespread. The 240 billion lines of Cobol code running today power approximately 85 percent of all daily business transactions worldwide.

Most organizations don't have the processes in place to capture their employees' business and system intelligence before they leave for good.

It’s especially difficult for engineers. Today’s software tools don't allow them to easily convey their expertise to others – or enable developers, business managers, and executives to easily discover and utilize any previously shared knowledge.

What can you do?

You might be surprised to discover that your engineers’ domain and system knowledge already resides in one other place outside their minds – your software. While creating the code, development teams pour their organization, programming, and business intelligence into your applications.

Imagine what you could do if your organization's technical and business stakeholders had access to all of the knowledge and human intent embedded in your software applications. Imagine asking your software application how it works and having it answer you back.

How can you unlock all of that untapped knowledge?

Liberate encoded knowledge

Phase Change Software is creating AI-assistive technology that unlocks the encoded knowledge embedded in your software applications.

Our assistive AI understands your software and turns it into formal units of knowledge. In essence, software is transformed into data.

Our AI assistant will liberate your software's hidden knowledge and help it understand itself. Our natural language processing (NLP) techniques will enable your technical and business stakeholders to easily interact with applications.

You will soon be able to literally have a conversation with your software, and have it teach you its encoded programming, business, and domain knowledge.

learn more about our technology

 

 

Todd Erickson is a tech writer with Phase Change Software. You can reach him at [email protected].

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