Once again the venerable COBOL programming language is back in the news. It seems California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to try and balance the state budget by temporarily cutting the salaries of a lot of state workers.

Apparently, this is some sort of attempt to bring the legislature to heel by holding the pay of state workers hostage on the assumption that worker anger will force legislators to negotiate with the governor in good faith.

As misguided as that may be, it looks like the governor will not be able to pull that off because the California controller John Chiang says that the state's payroll system, written in COBOL, isn't flexible enough to accommodate the necessary payroll changes without several months of advance notice.

Despite all the talk about revitalizing COBOL applications, this is another prime example of why business leaders are increasingly frustrated with IT. Whether you agree with the business decision or not, business leaders like the Governor Schwarzenegger want IT systems that are flexible enough to keep pace with changing business circumstances.

All too often they hear that the business is essentially being held up by arthritic IT systems that can't easily adapt to new business conditions. This issues is putting a premium on more flexible approaches to computing such as software-as-a-service and cloud computing. No doubt there are a lot of issues with Web-based applications, but the ability to quickly scale and change these applications provides a business benefit that increasingly outweighs all the benefits traditionally associated with legacy applications.

Even packaged applications such as those offered by SAP, Oracle and Microsoft leave a lot to be desired when it comes to flexibility. Microsoft has attempted to tap into this under current of business resentment with a "People Ready" advertising campaign for its software, but truthfully the difference in flexibility between the various packaged applications vendors comes down to a matter of indistinguishable degrees.

In their frustration, a lot of customers are returning to best-of-breed applications that promise more flexibility because they are not as tightly intertwined with a vast array of features and functions that are strewn across a massive suite of applications.

The bottom line here is that business leaders are insisting on IT architectures that guarantee the highest degree of flexibility for the business. That requirement is naturally leading to increased interest in iterative programming models and service-oriented architectures. But before new technology can be brought to bear, a lot of IT organizations still need to make an intellectual break with the past before IT rigor mortis sets in forever.