The Case for Application Modernization

August 18, 2010

Bill Ulrich is president of TSG, Inc. (www.tsgconsultinginc.com), a management consulting firm specializing in advising and mentoring businesses on business architecture/architecture alignment. He is also co-author of Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies (Morgan Kaufmann, 2010). We visited with Ulrich to discuss his recent book—along with the case for application modernization—and what sites are doing about it.

Mainframe Executive: Sites have had a decade of mainframe modernization. Over this period, what lessons have we learned about what does and doesn’t work?

Ulrich: We keep learning—and unlearning—the same things. I restructured my first COBOL program in 1980, and there were robust modernization methodologies dating back to the early ‘90s. However, true modernization, which is characterized by three interrelated disciplines—analysis, refactoring and transformation—has stalled in recent years. In part, it has been replaced by a “lift and shift” mindset, which moves intact systems to non-mainframe platforms and is driven by the narrow goal of saving money on mainframe costs. From this, organizations have learned several key lessons. The first is that ignoring core software assets or allowing them to degrade over long periods isn’t a good way to leverage powerful software assets, and it doesn’t position companies for business agility. This is because application and data structures are highly isolated and businesses are trying to become much less so, driven by customer demands and the need to be much more agile with business and competitive intelligence. Simply moving older architectures via lift and shift can be a real dead end because systems leaving the mainframe environment languish under emulation environments.

One company we worked with is now undergoing a major replacement effort for a set of lifted and shifted applications because they boxed themselves into older emulation tools and couldn’t take advantage of the advances in System z and related middleware over the past 10 or more years. Their systems and data degraded and it’s hurting them strategically. They’re looking at packages, major rewrites, and retooling. There are much more elegant ways of transforming applications to target architectures that involve platform changes. We present a handful of case studies on this topic in our book. What does work is systematic analysis, business/information technology architecture mapping, refactoring, and reuse where it advances a given set of project objectives. There’s no need or justification for moving most applications from the mainframe, but you can improve them dramatically and incrementally while achieving real business value. The mainframe isn’t going away for most organizations...