CBAP Practice Exam #13

Business Problem: The COBOL Clock is Ticking

The Conversation: "Look, we have a major problem at Global Connect. Our core billing and provisioning system—the 'Legacy Core'—is basically a 20-year-old dinosaur. It was built for a world where people just sent texts and made phone calls, but now 90% of our money comes from massive 5G data bundles and IoT device networks. The system just wasn't designed for this.

Right now, our customer service team enters an order, and then it just sits there. Data has to be batch-processed every six hours before the legacy system even sees it. Because of that lag, we’re losing about 2.1 million a year in 'unbillable overages'—essentially, customers use way more data than they have, but the system doesn't realize it until 12 hours after they’ve already hit their limit.

It gets worse with 5G. About 15% of those activations just flat-out fail because the old database doesn't have the right 'slots' to store 5G parameters. We have senior engineers—who should be building new products—spending their days manually typing data into the backend just to get customers connected. That’s 450,000 in high-value labor down the drain every year.

Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) has tanked by 25 points. Customers are angry about the delays and the weird bills. To top it off, we only have three people left who actually know how the COBOL code works, and two of them are retiring by the end of the year.

The Head of IT wants to 'Wrap and Renew' by throwing an AI layer on top to fix the errors (2.5M), while the Chief Architect wants to 'Rip and Replace' with a cloud-native setup (12M over two years). Meanwhile, the CFO is breathing down our necks to stop that (2.1M) leakage within the next 12 months."