Governments face urgent need to modernise legacy mainframe skills amid retiring experts and growing service demands

As the last generation of seasoned mainframe specialists retire, public agencies must adopt staged, hybrid cloud strategies and invest in knowledge transfer to prevent vulnerabilities and ensure ongoing service resilience.

Dorothy Pentreath is remembered as the last native speaker of Cornish, and Jennifer Nelson uses that historical image to frame a far less romantic but increasingly urgent problem in government technology: the last generation of seasoned COBOL, assembler and PL/I specialists is retiring, leaving state and local agencies exposed just as many of their core systems are reaching a staffing cliff. Her argument is that the issue is not simply about old software, but about the disappearance of the people who still understand how to keep it running. IBM says most US state governments still rely on mainframe computers, and the same platform family continues to underpin everything from tax administration to benefits and licensing. According to IBM’s own material, these systems remain relevant because they combine resilience, security and compliance, even as the talent base narrows.

That creates a difficult policy choice for public-sector leaders. Replacing long-proven systems can be slow, expensive and disruptive, yet doing nothing leaves agencies vulnerable to outages, security gaps and an accelerating loss of institutional knowledge. IBM’s government-facing material repeatedly pushes a hybrid approach rather than a wholesale rewrite, arguing that agencies can preserve the strengths of IBM Z and IBM i while moving less critical workloads elsewhere and gradually modernising the rest. In practice, that means treating modernisation as a staged programme rather than a single transformation project.

Nelson’s proposed first step is to invest in training and knowledge transfer. That reflects a basic market reality: public bodies rarely match private-sector pay, so they need to compete with opportunity, structure and mission. IBM has also promoted training ecosystems around its mainframe platforms, including tools, workshops and partner programmes designed to help organisations build internal expertise. The underlying logic is straightforward: if experienced engineers are leaving, agencies need a deliberate way to capture their knowledge before it disappears with them.

Her second and third recommendations are to adopt hybrid cloud methods and to bring older applications into modern development practices. IBM has argued that mainframe modernisation works best when organisations keep core workloads stable while using cloud services, DevOps-style workflows and automated delivery to improve agility and shorten release cycles. The company says this can boost interoperability, support data and analytics use cases, and make legacy systems easier to evolve without sacrificing the performance and reliability that made them indispensable in the first place.

The broader message is that governments cannot afford to treat this as a distant technical concern. IBM’s public-sector commentary presents mainframes as central to today’s digital state, processing sensitive and high-volume transactions that citizens depend on. Nelson’s point is sharper: the real danger is not that the systems will suddenly fail, but that agencies may lose the ability to operate and improve them at the very moment demand for public services is rising. Her preferred answer is a continuous modernisation strategy, built in small steps, with a clear roadmap, rather than a dramatic leap into replacement.

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Source: Fuse Wire Services