Helping retire a large legacy reporting system

The problem

Two pieces of reporting modernization ran through this role, and they are worth keeping straight because they produced different things.

The first was a legacy reporting environment that ran on a mainframe COBOL system with more than fifteen hundred lookup tables, accumulated over years, with the business logic encoded in the reports themselves rather than anywhere documented. That environment needed to move onto Cognos.

The second was a SAS migration, and that is where the licensing money was. Moving that reporting onto Cognos is what retired more than $1 million a year in licensing. The size of the legacy table estate is a separate number. It measures how tangled the old environment was, not how much was saved.

What both share is the same hard rule: you cannot turn a reporting system off until every report anyone depends on exists somewhere else and produces the same numbers.

What I did

I functioned as Product Owner and Senior Systems Analyst across this work, owning the Cognos reporting projects and the rewrite of existing reports onto the new platform.

Mapped before building. The work that made the legacy migration succeed was in-depth systems analysis: establishing what each report did, which of those fifteen hundred lookup tables it depended on, and which reports were still in use versus which had simply never been deleted. That last question mattered most. A migration that faithfully reproduces reports nobody reads costs twice what it should.

Built, tested, released. I developed, tested, and released more than a hundred Cognos reports supporting the SAS migration, managing the development, testing, and deployment cycle for each so that the output stood up against the system it was replacing. That report work is what made retiring the SAS licensing possible.

Replaced the data warehouse underneath. I helped replace a custom mainframe-based Perl/COBOL data warehouse with dynamic Cognos and SQL reporting.

Ran the adjacent bets. I also served as analyst on the SAS Visual Analytics pilot and on a separate legacy system retirement project, both of which fed the same strategic direction.

Outcome

The SAS migration retired more than $1 million in annual licensing, and the legacy environment moved off its mainframe COBOL foundation. The organization also came out of it with a documented understanding of its own reporting estate that it did not have going in, which outlasted both migrations.

Why it matters

Most of my later product work follows this shape. Something expensive and entrenched needs replacing, nobody has a complete picture of what depends on it, and the analysis has to come before the roadmap. I learned that here, along with the habit of being careful about which number belongs to which piece of work.