"There was a naming convention of three letters that represented the department the program was for, plus a five-digit number," fish says. "When the naming convention was established, the last two digits were for version control.

"Since then, the company had purchased a library system that had its own version control, and the practice of updating the last two digits was lost."

Unfortunately, after decades of using the system, the company is running out of numbers for the programs. Solution from IT management: Rename hundreds of programs with new prefixes.

Why not just use those last two digits? pilot fish asks. That would save all the work of changing hundreds of job-control routines to include the new program names.

"The response? 'We can't,' " says fish. "They said, 'It has been done this way for years, and we can't just start using those numbers.'