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Journal of Education for Business

ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20

COBOL's Role in a College Curriculum—A Pilot

Study

Kenneth T. Fougere , Laurie E. Macdonald & Kenneth J. Sousa

To cite this article: Kenneth T. Fougere , Laurie E. Macdonald & Kenneth J. Sousa (2003) COBOL's Role in a College Curriculum—A Pilot Study, Journal of Education for Business, 78:3, 164-169, DOI: 10.1080/08832320309599715

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08832320309599715

Published online: 31 Mar 2010.

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COBOL‘s Role in

a College

Curriculum-A

Pilot Study

KENNETH T. FOUGERE

LAURIE E. MAcDONALD

KENNETH J. SOUSA

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Bryant College

Smithfield, Rhode Island

n recent years, colleges have seen a

I

dramatic decrease in the number of students taking a COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) course. Though COBOL is still required in some college curricula, many schools have changed it to an elective and an increas- ing number have stopped offering it.

Having been exposed to languages such as Visual Basic, Java, C, and C++, today’s information systems (IS) students see COBOL as a dead language, like Latin. They encounter few articles on it in popular software magazines and few COBOL textbooks for sale com- pared with texts on other “latest and greatest software.” Thus, they assume that COBOL‘s importance as a programming language has declined in the business world. Furthermore, a growing number college professors, administra- tors, and parents of students hold the

same view.

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So, in spite of COBOL‘s record of

accomplishments and its staying power, the language appears to be losing ground in the ISIMISICIS college curricula. This is a curious phenomenon in view of the fact that it is still a major force in business. For example, 75% of all pro- duction transactions on mainframes use COBOL, 60% of all Web access resides

on a mainframe, and over 95%

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of

finance and insurance data is processed with COBOL (Arranga, 2002).

164

Journal of Education for

Business

ABSTRACT. In this study of the role of COBOL in the information systems

(IS) curriculum, the authors surveyed companies that recruit at Bryant Col- lege to investigate their perceptions of (a) the importance of new recruits’ skills in programming languages, including COBOL; (b) the importance

of other application development skills; and (c) the competency level of graduates.These results should be use- ful to universities attempting to determine the role that COBOL should play in the IS curriculum.

The history of COBOL is well docu- mented. One of the first high-level programming languages, COBOL was introduced in 1959 by the Conference on Data System Languages (Glass, 1997). Since its inception more than 40 years ago, COBOL has been the most used language for software development and maintenance in business organizations (Ulrich, 2001). The language went through its first major revision in 1968, when ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) published its standards (Paul, 1999). Later revisions occurred in 1974 and 1985. However, it was not until COBOL 1997 that object- oriented constructs were added to the ANSI standard. The first new standard of this millennium was due out in 2002. Some of the major features include improved object-oriented features, free format and inline comments, detecting and reporting of program exception

errors, the addition of new data types, improved file sharing and record lock- ing, and others (Coyle, 2000).

Today there are approximately 180 billion lines of COBOL code world- wide, and an estimated 15% of all new application functionality through 2005 will be written in COBOL. In addition, many companies spent considerable sums to update these programs during the Y2K conversion. Modernizing legacy applications is one of the key issues facing information technology (IT) managers today because there is enormous pressure on organizations to change the way they run their business to meet the new paradigm for commerce.

Legacy applications are those that have been inherited from languages, platforms, and techniques that business- es used earlier. Most companies that have such systems use them to service critical business needs. The challenge is to keep those applications running while connecting to newer, more efficient technologies and programmer skills. Currently, many companies are in the process of migrating their legacy applications to programming languages and operating systems that follow open (nonproprietary) standards (Anony- mous, 2001). Though some companies have moved away from the mainframe, rewritten their core applications, and moved to other platforms such as Unix

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and Windows NT, rewriting COBOL applications from the ground up is the most costly and time consuming of available options (Arranga, 2000). For those companies that choose to leverage their COBOL assets while adding new platforms to meet the new commerce paradigm, COBOL programmers will

need to acquire additional skills. Most

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Fortune 1000 companies have an exten- sive investment in COBOL and need to leverage that legacy for e-commerce, business-to-business, and internal sup-

port (Hardgrave &

Doke, 2000).

Two major changes are positioning COBOL to continue to be a force in the new IS world. First, a number of tools “Web-enable” the language. Several offer HTML extensions, n-tier capabili- ty, and GUI (graphical user interface) creation to take advantage of the latest hardware and software platforms. Sec- ond, the next release of COBOL, called 00 (object-oriented) COBOL, includes many 00 extensions. Organizations are finding that the learning curve for learning 00 COBOL is significantly less (about 12 weeks) than that for other object-oriented languages such as C++ (about 40 weeks) and Smalltalk (about 80 weeks) (Anonymous, 1997).

There is a lengthy taxonomy of COBOL tools, providers, and products on the market today. The offerings include tools that extend legacy application to the Web. One example, PER- COBOL Enterprise 2.5, is provided by LegacyJ, a company that assists in migrating existing COBOL programs directly to the Web by using Java encap- sulation, which allows for fast deploy- ment. Another product, NetCOBOL, from Fujitsu, is a software compiler that generates 100% java applets or applications from existing COBOL code (Sulli- van, 2000).

In addition, Fujitsu plans to release a compiler that allows COBOL programmers to write to Microsoft’s multivendor language tool Visual Studio.NET. The compiler will take advantage of the common runtime that Microsoft is building into .NET, which interprets the script at runtime so programs can be written in COBOL, or in any of the visual Stu- dio.NET languages, and work with the .NET platform and services. Companies like Acucorp, with their ACUCobol-GT

software, give provide the option of con- verting legacy COBOL applications to the Internet. Merant’s Net Express software does the same. These software products give IS managers the option to leverage their legacy applications as opposed to completely rewriting them.

COBOL has proven its integrative ability, which should give it credibility in the IS community. On the desktop, COBOL IDES can input COBOL source code and output Java byte code; run a5 COBOL virtual machines inside browsers; invoke and communicate with Java Beans, COM, and CORBA objects; use ActiveX controls; and generate COBOL graphical interfaces. On the server side, COBOL can interoperate with CORBA, DCOM, and Enterprise Java Beans; work with and control

HTML and Dynamic HTML; and be the CGI language working with form data and named environment variables. COBOL‘s Accept and Display verbs can receive and present name-value pairs. On the mainframe, COBOL‘s strict adherence to backward compatibility allows COBOL programs from the 1960s to intermix object-oriented and procedural statements to invoke other objects or be invoked by them (Arranga

& Price, 2000).

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Method

In this pilot study, we surveyed the companies that recruit at our college to ascertain the importance of COBOL to them and the competency in that language of our recent graduates. Further- more, we sought to determine the recruiters’ perceptions about COBOL‘s future. Though COBOL was our main interest in the study, we also sought to determine our recruiters’ perceptions of the level of competency of recent graduates with other application development skills. We used the following hypotheses to guide our research:

H,: There will be no significant differences between the mean values of Graduating Student Competency and Company Importance. (In other words, the competency of graduating students in the defined skill will be relatively equal to the company’s perception of the importance of that skill).

H,: There will be significant differences between the mean values of the Graduating Student Competency and Company Importance. (In other words, there will be a difference between the competency of graduating students in the defined skill and the company’s perception of the importance of the skill.)

We developed a questionnaire based on the work of Sousa, Chen, Ebrahim- pour, & Fougere (2002) and sent it to all companies that recruit CIS students at our college. Thirty-three survey questionnaires were mailed, and 20 usable questionnaires were returned, for a 61 %

rate of return. The questionnaire was designed to gather data on the companies’ perceptions of (a) the importance of the computer languages taught at Bryant College, (b) the importance of other application development skills, and (c) the level of competency of our recent graduates.

Results

We asked respondents to use a Likert-

type scale ranging from 1

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(low) to 5

(high) to rate the importance of various

languages to their company and the level of competency of recent graduates.

In Figure 1, we display the ratings of the importance of various languages, and in Figure 2 we show the ratings for the competency of recent graduates. The respondents also rated the importance that their companies placed on various

application skills (see Figure

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3) and the

competency of recent graduates in these

skills (see Figure

4).

We also gave the survey respondents a series of statements to appraise COBOL‘s continuing role in IT and its place in the undergraduate IT curriculum. We show those results in Figure 5,

in which a low score indicates disagree- ment with the statement and a high score indicates agreement.

Discussion

In the first component of the survey, we used paired ratings for Importance to the Company and Competency of Grad- uates for each language skill. We ana- lyzed those data by comparing the paired difference between the measure-

January/February 2003 165

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4.50

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0.50

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COBOL Java Structured C++ Visual Query Basic Language

Programming language

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Note. Respondents rated importance to company on a scale ranging from 1

(low) to 5

(high).

FIGURE 1. Programming language skills: Importance to company.

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e

0)

C

c

8

2

6

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Query Basic Language

Programming language

5

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Note. Respondents rated competency of graduates on a scale ranging from 1 (low) to 5 (high).

FIGURE 2. Programming language skills: Competency of recent graduates.

ments through a nonparametric statistical method. Through this method, we calculated the absolute values of each response based on the two related variables in order to test the hypothesis that they had the same distribution. This test, which included no assumptions about the shape of the distribution, considered the’ magnitude of differences within pairs and assigned more weight to pairs that showed large differences than to those variable pairs that showed small differences. The test statistic was based on the ranks of the absolute values of the differences between the two variables.

To analyze the results of the survey properly, one should determine the differences between the paired variables relating to the importance and competency values relative to each skill. To accomplish this properly, we performed two statistical tests: (a) analysis of vari-

ance

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(ANOVA) to determine if there

was any significant differences between values, and (b) the nonparametric, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test to calculate the differences, if any, between two related variables.

Acceptance of the null hypothesis for this analysis would indicate that respon-

dents believed that there were no differences between the competency and market importance of a skill according to the mean scores based on an observed significance level, or p value. Conversely, a

calculated p value that is less then the

observed significance level of the test would translate to a rejection of the null hypothesis, which would strongly indicate that there were differences between the measured value and the mean scores. We completed the ANOVA test and

found that 9 of the 10 variable pairs

showed significant differences (p < .05).

The ANOVA results, as shown in Table

1, calculated the largest negative Z score

for COBOL (-3.974) and maintenance

programming (-3.868).

The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test cal- culates the difference between variable pairs for related variables (McClave, Benson, & Sincich, 1995). For this test,

we calculated the difference for each respondent’s variable pair values by subtracting the market importance from the graduating student competency value. We counted the number of positive, negative, and tie values as well as the mean rank, positive and negative, for each of the variable pairs. In addition, the test calculated a sum of the negative and positive values for each of the variables. The differences between these summary values illustrate the magnitude of the values, positively or negatively, as shown by the survey data. For the Wilcoxon test, it is important to determine the difference, if any, between the competency of graduating students and the company importance for each skill defined in the survey. Therefore, the Wilcoxon test requires each of the related variables to be paired in the form of an arithmetic formula to generate a value to determine the difference between responses. Based on the respondent’s survey values, the formula that we used for this test was [Compe- tency of Graduates] - [Importance to Company]. In Table 2, we show a listing of the results of the Wilcoxon Rank Test for all variable pairs having significant differences. With the exception of C++, all results were found to have significant differences (p < .05).

We sorted the data in Table 2 in descending order by the sum of the ranks difference values. The range of

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5 1

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Transaction Object- Web Structured Maintenance processing oriented applications programming programming

systems programming

Application

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Note. Respondents rated importance to company on a scale ranging from 1 (low) to

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5 (high).

FIGURE 3. Application development: Importance to company.

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Application

Note. Respondents rated competency of graduates on a scale ranging from 1 (low) to 5

(high).

FIGURE 4. Application development: Competency of recent graduates.

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values for each paired variable difference is determined by the sample size of the survey. For a sample size of 20, the valid range of values for this column is -210 to 210. A calculated difference value that lies on the outer boundaries of this range would indicate a large difference in the sample response to the paired variable. Similarly, a summary value equal to zero would suggest that there are no differences between the paired responses provided by the survey data.

The results of this test showed that five of the variable pairs (COBOL, SQL

[Structured Query Language], Object- Oriented Programming, Structured Progamming, and Maintenance Pro- gramming) did not calculate a positive ranking; that is, all respondents rated the importance of the skill to the company as higher than the graduating students’ competency in the same skill. In each of these cases, the respondents believed that the gap between competency and importance was significantly larger than that for the other skills.

The results of the statistical tests clearly indicate that IT recruiters at

Bryant College continue to demonstrate a high emphasis on COBOL skills (rn =

4.00) and that the competency of gradu-

ates in those skills is significantly less

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( m = 1.95). Coincidentally, the respondents also validated a significant need for additional focus and training relating to maintenance programming, which showed the highest mean score of all importance responses (4.75). Ana- lyzing the results compiled from the sta- tistical tests in Table 2, we found that four of the Wilcoxon rankings showing a high mean score for skill importance

(> 4.0) related to procedural, third-gen- eration programming language issues. The significant gap found in the respondents’ scores indicates that the COBOL programming language, coupled with the methodologies of structured programming and maintenance programming, should hold a visible and significant position in the IT higher education curricula.

Conclusion

The respondents to our survey rated COBOL as a language of major importance to their business applications. At the same time, they indicated that recent graduates are not meeting expectations for COBOL competency. Furthermore, the survey respondents noted that COBOL will continue to be a major language in their business computing.

In spite of COBOL‘s important role, anecdotal evidence suggests that students see COBOL as a dead language and therefore avoid developing skills in it. Though many applications continue

to be run on mainframes using COBOL as the principle programming language, many software companies are attempting to allow organizations to leverage their COBOL assets through the use of interconnectivity to various hardware and software platforms designed to meet the challenges of today’s new commerce paradigm. The findings of our pilot study indicate that recruiters believe that COBOL should remain a part of our IS curriculum and that students should be encouraged to study it.

Our analysis of the survey data indicates significant differences between graduates’ competency level in and the

January/February 2003 167

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COBOL will continue to be a major language for business IT. Every undergrad studying IT should take a COBOL course. COBOL is critical to a career in IT. Recent graduates have a strong COBOL foundation. COBOL represents the past and will have little use in the future.

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TABLE 1. Results of ANOVA Test of Competency Versus Importance

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* p < .05.

TABLE 2. Skills: Means for Graduates' Competency and Importance to Company

Skill

Graduates' Wilcoxon

competency Importance to sum of

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(M) company (M) rankings

COBOL

Maintenance programming Object oriented programming Transaction processing SQL Structured programming Web applications JAVA Visual Basic C++, Visual C

1.95 1.95 2.00 2.15 2.60 2.75 2.45 2.75 2.70 2.25 4.00 4.75 3.90 4.35 4.45 4.55 3.50 3.55 3.35 2.25

- 190.00

- 190.00 -153.00 -150.00 -136.00 -136.00 -1 25.00

-73.00 -62.00

-1

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importance of a number of application development skills as well. These results should not be considered star- tling. In a competitive business environment, employers can often perceive that recent graduates are not adequately pre- pared with the necessary application development skills required by the industry. Business organizations prefer to hire employees who can provide immediate productivity with a minimal investment of time and training. In the dynamic and time-pressured IT environment, the demand for highly skilled professionals tends to be critical.

Our findings indicate a number of areas for further research. Our study's small sample size and the fact that all the respondent companies were in New Eng- land limit its value. An obvious next step is to expand the sample size to include companies that do not recruit at Bryant College and, especially, companies out- side of New England. Future researchers could examine in greater detail the per- ceived lack of competency of recent graduates in various application development skills and which curriculum revisions might be required to address this issue. Finally, research should be done to discover specific reasons why students do not enroll in COBOL courses in greater numbers and to determine which steps can be taken to increase student interest in this important language.

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