The Case for Modernization

Legacy applications, unlike fine wine, do not improve with age. Yet many IT leaders mistakenly believe they can save money by leaving their enterprise applications untouched, reasoning that they still work — so why fix them? However, this approach is risky. Failing to modernize your enterprise applications can lead to several significant consequences:

• Missing Out on New Features
  The pace at which new, valuable features are being developed is accelerating. Your competitors are likely leveraging these advancements — enhancing speed, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and insight generation.
• Falling Behind in Technology
  Technologies like cloud, containers and serverless architecture offer powerful ways to improve scalability, security and cost-efficiency. Legacy applications may struggle to support these technologies, limiting your ability to take advantage of them.
• Hidden Costs
  Older applications often generate the highest number of support tickets, many of which take the longest time to resolve. These issues result in lost productivity and can divert resources to troubleshooting instead of innovation. Additionally, the growing difficulty in attracting and retaining IT professionals with expertise in legacy systems compounds the problem.
• Security Risks
  Older applications are more susceptible to security vulnerabilities. Even if established vendors continue to support outdated versions, they may prioritize new features over security updates, leaving your system exposed to modern threats. Delaying modernization could lead to catastrophic consequences.

In short, the choice is clear: modernize now or face higher costs and risks down the road. The consequences of waiting go beyond financial costs.

Crafting Your Modernization Strategy

To successfully navigate your modernization journey, a consistent methodology is crucial. By clearly defining your approach, your teams can communicate effectively, make informed decisions and track progress. Keeping the process objective and goal-oriented ensures a smoother experience.

1. Assess Your Current State

When embarking on a mainframe modernization journey, one of the most critical steps is a thorough and comprehensive assessment. Skipping or rushing through this assessment can have dire consequences, often leading to unclear goals, missed dependencies and a misalignment with business needs. An incomplete or hasty evaluation may fail to uncover potential roadblocks, making it difficult to define the scope of the project, and resulting in delays, budget overruns or even project failure. It's crucial to take the time to fully assess the current system, understand the business requirements and identify technical challenges before diving into the migration process.

Begin by gaining a clear understanding of your existing applications. An assessment will guide your next steps. Key aspects to evaluate include:

• Version and Technology Stack: If commercial, the version of the applications and lists of customizations; if custom-built, the tools and components used, whether the source code is still available, and the compiler versions last used.
• Application Environment: This includes the operating system, system applications, virtualization methods and hardware dependencies.
• Data Environment: Analyze databases, data models, schemas and security measures in place.
• Source Code and Data Source Analysis: For application programs, e.g., languages used, lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, technical debt, rate of change, call chain, external dependencies (i.e., upstream and downstream), file and database access, CRUD operations in the program and external CRUD operations (i.e., of other programs against this program’s data).

A good assessment helps you determine dispositions, which applications should be encapsulated, rehosted, replatformed, refactored, rearchitected, rebuilt, replaced or retired. Leveraging expert guidance and modern tooling can accelerate this process, offering a comprehensive analysis of both your applications and data.

2. Define Your Goals Clearly

Your modernization strategy should align with your overall IT and business objectives. Start by identifying the outcomes you want to achieve:

• What does success look like?
• How do modernization goals contribute to broader business and IT targets?
• What timeline should you set?

Make sure your goals are measurable and easy to communicate. For example:

• "All applications will be containerized and running on the latest system software by December 2026, reducing support costs and increasing agility."
• "We will reduce the number of applications by 20% by June 2026, lowering maintenance costs."
• "We will consolidate our financial databases into a single platform by March 2026 to simplify reporting."
• "We will retire legacy on-prem functions and migrate to cost-effective SaaS solutions, recouping expenses."
• "By the end of 2026, 50% of our application portfolio will be on the public cloud, allowing us to close data centers."

Once goals are set, plan the roadmap: define the steps, milestones, and measurable objectives and key results (OKRs). These planning activities help break down the journey into manageable pieces while enabling you to demonstrate progress quantitatively. Also, be prepared to establish new IT standards, such as mandating containerization, support for the Twelve-Factor App methodology or mobile compatibility for updated applications.

3. Build Proofs of Concept (POCs)

Testing your ideas through POCs helps validate your strategies and build practical experience. Treat POCs as "throwaway" projects — valuable primarily for the lessons learned and the standards established.

These early efforts, often focused on low-risk, low-complexity applications, provide an opportunity to experiment with new approaches and gain quick, positive results. The knowledge gained from these efforts can be applied across all future projects.

4. Calculate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

A thorough TCO analysis will help you understand and manage costs throughout the modernization process. As applications move to the cloud, the cost model shifts from capital expenditures and depreciation to subscription-based operating expenses. This change can complicate financial analysis, so it’s essential to track and manage costs closely, ensuring alignment with your financial goals.

5. Manage Stakeholder Engagement

One major pitfall is insufficient stakeholder involvement. Modernizing a mainframe system impacts multiple facets of an organization, from IT teams to end users, so it's essential to keep all stakeholders in the loop. Without proper engagement, expectations can become misaligned, and key personnel may not feel committed to the project. This can lead to a lack of support during the migration and a failure to address the needs of the business. Ensuring consistent communication and involvement of all relevant parties throughout the process will help guarantee smoother collaboration, better alignment and more successful outcomes.

6. Plan for Infrastructure Readiness

Additionally, failing to adequately plan for the migration process can set the project up for failure. Insufficient planning often leads to unforeseen delays, unexpected costs and incomplete migrations. It’s not just about moving the data and code; the overall infrastructure readiness, phased deployment strategies and thorough performance testing are vital components that should be part of the planning process. Without these safeguards in place, businesses risk facing deployment bottlenecks, compatibility issues and performance degradation after migration. A solid plan should consider these elements and provide a clear roadmap for the entire modernization effort.

Avoiding these common pitfalls will significantly improve the likelihood of success in mainframe modernization projects. Proper preparation, communication and strategic planning are the keys to unlocking the full potential of modernization and ensuring that the new system will meet both current and future business needs.

Executing the Strategy

As you ramp up your modernization efforts, communication is crucial. Your strategy should be dynamic, adapting to both changes in business priorities and new technological opportunities. Using scorecards to monitor progress against goals is a great way to keep everyone on track. And remember to celebrate the milestones you reach along the way!

While modernization might seem like a daunting task, it’s an investment in the future of your IT infrastructure, security and business agility. With the right strategy, you can ensure that your organization remains competitive and ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

This article was originally published on December 15, 2021, and has since been updated.