Accelerate Time to Benefit Taking an Incremental Approach to Mainframe Modernization
Client Situation and Challenge
Our client utilizes legacy mainframe-based systems to manage sensitive data for many millions of customers. They engaged GTSG to determine how best to utilize cloud capabilities in order to improve the agility and effectiveness of several key workflows.
Unlike many clients who contact us, this mainframe is not scheduled for sunset. Many valued the authoritative data source and believed the platform would be around for the foreseeable future.
However, we did find disagreement among senior executives, specifically between
- those who saw the value but who would move to alternate platforms over time, and
- those who would decommission the platform quickly, risking potentially serious operational issues during transition.
In addition:
- a highly competent technical team had no interest in migrating away from what they do so well. Indeed, they “protected” the platform with modernization estimates so high as to be seen impractical
- the high percentage of analog, paper-based input into the system provides an additional impediment to change
- the data model didn’t lend itself to being segmented without a complex bidirectional replication.
For any scenario, the client insisted that current performance, availability and recoverability could not be compromised by hybrid complexity, i.e., housing both data and function on-premises and in the cloud.
Engagement Approach
GTSG led the client through a series of structured decision-making processes:
- Guiding Principles Development and Criteria Mapping
- Measurement Criteria Definition
- Solution Design Decision Model
From these framing activities, they identified three representative Mainframe Business Process Flows for further analysis. We collected the data and performed the analysis, We then developed three Solution Alternatives with benefits and considerations identified for each, with a recommended course of action. Of course, no alternative could degrade current performance characteristics: great performance; continuous availability; fractions of seconds of data loss risk.
Insight: GTSG brought focus to a significant inhibitor to modernization efforts: the outdated functionality of the Business Rules Engine, for which there was no direct replacement- and from which there is no easy transition.
The business rules engine also performed database updates, so our client couldn’t develop a new function without relying upon it.
Client Benefits
In addition to “answering the question,” GTSG has helped the client resolve the organizational conflict by presenting a set of fact-based alternatives and recommendations for moving forward.
GTSG delivered a detailed Analysis of Solution Alternatives and Execution Roadmap which laid out the foundational activities for each solution alternative. This deliverable is the client’s guide to action through the multi-year effort.
The answer was, “No, we can’t just ‘turn the mainframe off’- but we can begin to add capability through integration with public cloud capabilities. Perhaps as importantly, they now understand that the Business Rules Engine is the most significant technical roadblock to change.
Finally, we cautioned our client that they could not simply “starve” the legacy application environment during the transition period. This is a multi-year transition, during which the client must maintain capacity and operational currency for both cost and performance reasons.