From the time we get up until we go to bed, we interact, often unknowingly, with dozens of IT systems. And at least $2.5 trillion was spent on trying to replace legacy IT systems, of which some $720 billion was wasted on failed replacement efforts.īut it's astonishing how seldom people notice these IT systems, even with companies and public institutions spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on them. Of this amount, about three-quarters went toward operating and maintaining existing IT systems. Since 2010, corporations and governments worldwide have spent an estimated $35 trillion on IT products and services.

These systems are prone to outages and errors, vulnerable to cyberintrusions, and progressively more expensive and difficult to maintain. It is equally easy to find airlines, banks, insurance companies, and other commercial entities that continue to rely on old IT, contending with software or hardware that is no longer supported by the supplier or has defects that are too costly to repair. However, it took up to 20 weeks to send out all the payments because the IRS computer systems are even older than the states' unemployment systems, some dating back almost 60 years.Īs the legendary investor Warren Buffett once said, “It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked.' The pandemic has acted as a powerful outgoing tide that has exposed government's dependence on aging legacy IT systems.īut governments aren't the only ones struggling under the weight of antiquated IT. taxpayers were to receive $1,200 payments from the Internal Revenue Service. As part of the federal government's pandemic relief plan, eligible U.S. Similar problems have emerged at the federal level. A clearly exasperated Murphy said that when the pandemic passed, there would be a post mortem focused on the question of “how the heck did we get here when we literally needed cobalt programmers?' Things were so bad in New Jersey that Governor Phil Murphy pleaded in a press conference for volunteer COBOL programmers to step up to fix the state's Disability Automated Benefits System. Most of those systems date from the 1980s, and some go back even further. And untold numbers of the newly jobless waited weeks for their unemployment benefit claims to be processed, while others anxiously watched their bank accounts for an extra US $600 weekly payment from the federal government.ĭelays in processing unemployment claims in 19 states- Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin-are attributed to problems with antiquated and incompatible state and federal unemployment IT systems. This past spring, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs due to lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

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