System z Architect
As many organizations have been diligently working to enable a mobile, work from home (WFH) workforce, the awareness and emphasis on Enterprise Modernization appears to be gaining traction again. The interest uptick in Enterprise Modernization may likely be a result of existing z Systems meeting the increased business demands, via its architectural advantages such as Capacity on Demand, or enabling existing (unused) processors built into the hardware. The reality that the existing infrastructure can be “dialed-up” for additional compute power, without having to perform a hardware installation, hardware refresh, or have additional equipment purchased and delivered reinvigorated the awareness of the flexibility, scalability, and reliability of the z System platform.
Enterprise Modernization is not just a project. It is a journey. It encompasses the entire datacenter and Information Technology organization from Application Development to Operations.
Enterprise Modernization is not just about tooling, programming languages, or cloud. It is about finding the best integrations and solutions to enhance adoption and technology delivery. It is a continuous process to identify, implement, and refine people processes, infrastructure, and procedures to deliver leading edge Information Technology solutions to the business.
They key focus areas for any Enterprise Modernization journey are grounded in four pillars: Data Management, Infrastructure Optimization, Application Development, and Process Integration.
Application Development
Many organizations view Enterprise Modernization as simply “let’s get rid of COBOL”, or “let’s re-write all of our applications”. Visionary organizations realize that they have invested millions of dollars in the applications and business logic that run their day-to-day operations, and that it is not financially viable to “throw the baby out with the bath water”. These organizations look for ways to drive their application development technologies forward without wasting decades of investments or incurring the high risk associated with an application re-write into a new language. Existing applications can be easily API-enabled, allowing web services, RESTful calls, and open architectures to consume existing business logic with minimal development costs. New applications can be written to exploit these same RESTful interfaces, or directly retrieve data from Db2 z/OS without the need to clone and refresh data structures across multiple platforms.
The System z ecosystem also fully supports development in Java, Python, and other languages in addition to just COBOL. Language Environment (LE) has enabled components written in one language to easily invoke and integrate with components developed in different languages. Java applications can be written and executed in batch, deployed to CICS, or used as Db2 Stored Procedures. Leveraging Red Hat OpenShift technologies on z/OS can also enable capabilities for Secure Service Containers (zCX – z/OS Container Extensions) along with the ability to develop and deploy Docker containers within the platform.
IT organizations not only need to embrace newer technologies for their application development but they must also be willing to update and remediate existing applications for several key reasons:
- There is indeed a diminishing pool of developers capable of supporting many legacy technologies. That pool of developers will continue to shrink, and the organization’s ability to modify, repair, integrate, or fix those applications, along with their artifacts, will continue to decline.
- Ever-increasing third-party licensing fees for “functionally stabilized” technologies will continue to impact the budget. Identify those technologies with a small or moderate installed base and embark on actively replacing those technologies.
- Existing software infrastructures may slow an organization’s ability to adopt newer technologies.
Process Integration
An important aspect of Enterprise Modernization is to review and evaluate areas of process improvement. It is not enough to just pick tools for an organization to use. There needs to be a vision and strategy for the implementation and incorporation of that tooling to provide a cohesive process to enable various stake holders to gain value and insight.
Prior to the advent of the marketing term “DevOps”, technologists focused on “Software Development LifeCycle” (SDLC) to represent the process and tooling involved with enabling, managing, and ensuring the quality of the application development and production implementation/turnover processes. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was a model developed in the late 1980’s to provide formality and optimization of processes. CMM provided a framework for practitioners to adopt for continuous improvement similarly to how DevOps is about refining and optimizing process.
Organizations should always be investigating and looking for improvements in their software delivery processes. Application Development practices, along with the techniques for development have been migrating to more Agile practices, regardless of platform. There is no one “silver bullet” for an organization. The organization needs to identify, manage, define, and optimize their development lifecycle processes to deliver the highest quality software in the most cost-effective manner. Automation of manual processes, automated delivery, and key indicators during the process are essential for an efficient and robust development lifecycle.
Technology choices and existing tooling should be evaluated on a strategic, annual basis. It takes serious direction, evaluation, planning, and willingness to improve and facilitate a modernization initiative.
Summary
Enterprise Modernization doesn’t happen overnight. Proper planning, tooling, inventory analysis, application awareness, and a strategic IT direction are essential to maintaining a peak development organization. IT leadership must ensure that essential legacy systems continue to add value to the bottom line, and do not create a bottleneck for the future of the organization.
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