Unlocking the Business Value in Mainframes

by Joshua Fox
February 22, 2010

Mainframe systems hold the IT power that drives the largest enterprises, yet their tremendous potential often remains locked up in siloed systems. CIOs and IT executives realize the need for agility and reuse in today’s environment. They must satisfy new regulatory and business requirements for reporting, security, privacy, straight-through processing, and Business-to-Business (B2B) integration. Yet there’s neither time nor need to redevelop core functionality now supported by mainframes. Instead, executives have been undertaking Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) projects to expose their mainframe functionality as services: simple, loosely coupled interfaces that reflect business needs.

To achieve this, architects and analysts must align IT data with the business by mapping technically oriented legacy systems to the organizational requirements they serve. Automated systems significantly accelerate the work of the analysts and architects. We’ll describe approaches to automating the business and technical analysis of mainframe systems, reducing costs and time-to-market. These include search engines and automated classification systems specialized on mainframe metadata, as well as manual mapping tools and tagging systems.

With the mappings in place, a company can rapidly move ahead to wrapping its mainframes in services, modernizing business processes, and making the mainframe an even greater asset for driving down costs, increasing agility, and capitalizing on new business opportunities.

Legacy Transformation

CIOs and IT executives are working to uncover the tremendous value locked in their mainframe systems: strategic “Big Iron” applications on IMS, CICS, and DB2 running on operating systems such as z/OS and Linux on System z.

Mainframes have provided the infrastructure for ITdriven business successes in large enterprises; they power the management of supply chains, customer relationships, human capital, and business processes.

The time has come to open up the mainframe to new opportunities for cost reduction and revenue enhancement, once the functionality can be leveraged for reuse outside the silo of the application for which it was developed. So, for example, if a mainframe provides inventory information in a siloed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, it should also flexibly and quickly provide the same information for a modern CRM system, or even for a B2B integration.

But you can’t reuse something you don’t understand.

When mainframe systems were first developed, their focus was strictly in technical processing, with little concern for business-oriented rapid reuse. In the early days, software had to execute close to the metal for maximum performance, with a minimum of abstraction layers to hide low-level detail. Code had to fit into limited memory and disk space, which meant identifiers were short and cryptic. Code was tightly coupled and fine-grained; each unit of code addressed only a narrow area of technical functionality. Comments were lacking, and manuals were often in hard copy. Often, there was no clear record of the connection between these mainframe IT systems and the business requirements they addressed.