[specialist]

> a large contingent of people who essentially do manual data copying

Yup.

I was briefly part of a decades long effort to migrate off a main frame backend. It was basically a very expensive shared flat file database (eg FileMaker Pro). Used by thousands of applications, neither inventoried or managed. Surely a handful were critical for daily operations, but no one remembered which ones.

And the source data (quality) was filthy.

I suggested we pay some students to manually copy just the bits of data our spiffy "modern" apps needed.

No one was amused.

--

I also suggested we find a suitable COBOL runtime and just forklift the mainframe's "critical" infra into a virtual machine.

No one was amused.

Lastly, I suggested we throttle access to every unidentified mainframe client. Progressively making it slower over time. Surely we'd hear about anything critical breaking.

That suggestion flew like a lead zeppelin.