Archive It Now!
By Gina Berger, Program Manager
Tell me if this story sounds familiar. You have customer or other business information in an old COBOL-based mainframe application. Maintaining the application and keeping it up-to-date in order to keep it available and free from security vulnerabilities is costly and consumes resources that could be focused on innovation and customer focused activities.
Only one or two people know how to support the COBOL-based application and they’re due to retire soon. You’re in a huge pickle. You don’t want to hire a replacement to support an application that’s built on outdated technology and would like to move the data to somewhere that can easily be accessed, supported, and has longevity.
One of our healthcare clients had this exact challenge. This large hospital network used a variety of applications to manage patient data, revenue cycle information, medical records, and other healthcare information. One application was an old COBOL-based mainframe application that frequently went down. It was being used to access historical patient data and to burndown existing Accounts Receivable data, which had a significant impact on cash flow.
The COBOL application was no longer supported by the vendor and the only person on our client’s team who had knowledge of the application was set to retire.
The client had about a four-week period to move the data to a supported platform, create simple user interfaces, and develop reporting tools so the hospital could continue its patient care and AR collection processing.
Flatirons got down to business. We used our ETL Acceleration Suite to extract the COBOL data, transform it to XML, and load the data into OpenTextTM InfoArchive, a secure archiving platform that stores structured and unstructured data in a consolidated repository and can accommodate the client’s future archiving needs. We created focused user interfaces and reports to allow the hospital to seamlessly continue their collections processing.
Within a few weeks, we moved the data into the new archive platform providing our client with the peace of mind and business continuity they needed, our friend retired, and the system crashed for the last time two days later.
Will your organization find yourselves in a similar situation when it’s too late? Archive your COBOL-based application now. We’re here to help!
