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Why organizations still depend on old systems
Legacy is not another word for unimportant. In a 2025 review of 69 federal legacy IT systems, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified 11 as most in need of modernization. They supported essential functions including health care, tax processing, critical infrastructure, and national security. GAO also reported that the government spends over $100 billion on IT each year, with most of it used to operate and maintain existing systems. GAO’s report concerns selected federal systems; it does not describe every public- or private-sector environment.
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Replacing a system that still performs essential work is not a simple swap. It may have connections to other applications, data stores, and operational processes. Keeping it running can be necessary while an organization plans how to change it. But stable operation today does not settle whether its components are supported, secure, or maintainable tomorrow.
What can be lost when a specialist leaves?
Knowing a language such as COBOL is only one layer of expertise. A maintainer may also understand the system’s data formats, business rules, batch schedules, exception handling, operational recovery, and the reasons behind decisions that are not fully captured in documentation. A successor can learn the language and still need help understanding how this particular system behaves.
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This is a practical risk, not a measured estimate of how much knowledge is undocumented or how often retirements cause outages. The cited sources do not establish a universal retirement count or show that an individual departure directly causes a system failure. They do show why staffing and technology condition deserve attention together.
What the evidence says about technology and staffing risk
Federal systems can have several risks at once
Among GAO’s 11 most critical systems, eight used outdated programming languages, four had unsupported hardware or software, and seven had known cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Those categories can overlap: a system may face more than one problem. GAO also found incomplete modernization planning among agencies responsible for many of the selected critical systems and recommended better planning.
For selected Treasury systems that use COBOL and assembly, GAO describes the needed skills as “dwindling.” It warns that too few experts available to maintain a critical system creates significant mission risk. That finding applies to the selected systems in GAO’s review, not to every organization running COBOL.
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Mainframe workforce percentages are survey findings
Kyndryl’s 2025 mainframe modernization survey reported that 70% of surveyed organizations had difficulty finding talent for mainframe modernization. Among respondents across industries, 46% said new workforce entrants do not have mainframe skills, while 39% said staff were retiring and taking mainframe skills with them. These are respondent findings from a vendor-published survey, not a census of workers or employers, and they should not be generalized to all legacy systems or regions. Read Kyndryl’s 2025 survey report.
A different measure applies in the UK
The UK Parliament’s Committee of Public Accounts reported in 2025 that 28% of UK central-government systems met the government’s stated definition of legacy in 2024. That figure uses a UK government definition and a different population from GAO’s U.S. federal review, so it is not directly comparable with GAO’s count of selected systems. The committee’s report provides the UK context.
How to reduce the risk of knowledge walking out the door
Knowledge transfer addresses continuity; modernization changes the system or its environment. They can happen in parallel. An organization can document and transfer operational expertise while it assesses longer-term technical options.
Make the system’s dependencies and ownership visible
- Keep an inventory that identifies the system, its business purpose, major dependencies, and the people responsible for it.
- Document data meanings and formats, scheduled jobs, interfaces, exception handling, and recovery procedures—not just how to edit or compile the code.
- Record significant design decisions and the reasons for them, especially where they affect compliance, downstream systems, or recovery.
- Identify where only one person can diagnose or safely change a component, then prioritize those areas for paired work and documentation.
This checklist is practical guidance, not a checklist quoted from GAO. It follows the same need for explicit ownership and planning that makes modernization manageable.
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Transfer know-how through real maintenance work
Pair experienced maintainers with successors on routine changes, incident reviews, and recovery exercises. A runbook is more useful when someone other than its author can follow it under realistic conditions. Capture what happens when a scheduled job fails or data arrives in an unexpected format; those cases often reveal knowledge that a language tutorial cannot provide.
Plan modernization around mission risk
Before choosing a path, assess system criticality, unsupported hardware or software, known vulnerabilities, dependencies, recovery needs, available expertise, cost, and tolerance for change. GAO’s findings show why these are distinct questions rather than one general measure of whether a system is “old.” Its call for better modernization planning also means that a proposed change should have a clear owner and a funded transition plan.
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Modernization choices: preserve more or change more
Modernization is not a single action, and no approach is automatically safer or cheaper. The appropriate choice depends on the system and the organization’s constraints.
| Approach | What changes | What it means for knowledge transfer |
|---|---|---|
| Rehosting or replatforming | Moves an application to a different environment while preserving more of its existing application logic. | Existing business rules and operational knowledge remain important because much of the application behavior is retained. |
| Refactoring | Changes the implementation more substantially. | Teams must understand the existing behavior well enough to change it deliberately and check that essential rules still work. |
AWS describes replatforming existing COBOL and PL/I applications separately from automated refactoring in its mainframe modernization guidance. That establishes these as available approaches, not a guarantee of savings or reduced risk in a particular system. Retaining familiar logic may limit the scope of change, while deeper refactoring changes more of what maintainers need to understand. Neither removes the need to document the system’s behavior.
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A programming book or language course can help someone begin learning COBOL, but it cannot teach an organization’s data semantics, operating procedures, or undocumented business history. For a system-specific handover, pair language learning with access to maintainers, representative code and data flows, written operating procedures, and supervised work on actual maintenance tasks.
The goal is not simply to replace one person who knows the code. It is to make the system understandable and maintainable by a team, while giving the organization time to decide whether and how to change it.
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