> why you need to have, and maintain, technology-neutral specifications documentation.
In theory that is absolutely correct, with an unambiguous and current spec you can re-implement the software in something else without the original system the problem there (other than trying to get programmers to keep the documentation in sync with the system...) is that a specifications document written in English (or any natural language) is way too ambiguous to get away with that so then you decide to use a constrained version of English to write your spec and then someone says well why can't we get the machine to understand this and....COBOL again ;).
In theory that is absolutely correct, with an unambiguous and current spec you can re-implement the software in something else without the original system the problem there (other than trying to get programmers to keep the documentation in sync with the system...) is that a specifications document written in English (or any natural language) is way too ambiguous to get away with that so then you decide to use a constrained version of English to write your spec and then someone says well why can't we get the machine to understand this and....COBOL again ;).