It's Worse Than You Thought

The $400 billion figure that we quoted is actually the low end of the Gartner Group's (Stamford, CT) assessment. Gartner estimates that there are 220 billion lines of extant COBOL code. Locating code that must be mo dified, modifying it, and testing the modifications will cost 30 to 40 cents per line of code. Beyond the programming phases, additional costs of a year-2000 initiative, such as awareness, design, acceptance testing, implementation, documentation, and project management, increase the estimate to $1.10 per line of mainframe code.

Gartner also factored in the costs associated with languages other than COBOL, as well as the cost of fixing nonmainframe client/server systems, a good deal of which is associated with the labor-intensive process of assessing the problem. The result is a global, macroeconomic-based estimate of $400 billion to $600 billion that covers the years 1995 through 1999.--Dave Andrews, news editor