As enterprises undergo digital transformation, they soon run up against a sobering realization: everything must transform. Not just technology, but people and processes as well.
It’s no wonder, therefore, that today’s executives are looking for ways to lower their risk – perhaps by taking shortcuts, or maybe by breaking up the Herculean task of transformation into manageable, bite-size pieces.
For enterprises that depend upon certain legacy technologies – most notably, mainframes running COBOL – the challenge of transformation multiplies, as none of the options sound appealing.
Replatform legacy applications, even though the process is extraordinarily costly and yields poor results? Split the IT effort into ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ groups, in spite of the numerous strategic and organizational challenges such a bimodal approach introduces?
The good news: these two options aren’t the only choices. For many such enterprises, it’s possible to achieve the strategic goals of digital transformation by modernizing some technology in-place.
Here’s how it works.
Avoiding the Bimodal IT Anti-Pattern
First, let’s start with a simplified representation of the enterprise before it undertakes its digital transformation:
Figure 1: The ‘Before’ Picture
In the ‘before’ picture in figure 1 above, we have a siloed organization with slow, gatekeeper-oriented processes. We’ll refer to all the tools and technology in this picture as legacy, even though some of it may not be that old. Supporting the entire stack are the enterprise’s data.
Some people (Gartner in particular) recommend that if you’re saddled with the before picture above and wish to transform your business, it’s best to create a separate, ‘fast’ effort (Mode 2) while leaving the existing, ‘slow’ IT (Mode 1) alone, as figure 2 below illustrates.
Figure 2: The Bimodal IT Anti-Pattern
While bimodal IT has its appeal to anyone who’d rather not monkey with existing systems and processes, it has numerous flaws.
Technical personnel would much rather be on the Mode 2, ‘fast,’ cool side, leading to morale and staffing challenges. Bimodal IT also leads to counterproductive budgeting priorities that starve the slow, yet mission-critical Mode 1.
The anti-pattern above also leads to bifurcated corporate data that can cause customer issues, compliance breaches, and all manner of other ills.
Worst of all, an organization that follows figure 2 will never achieve true digital transformation, as such transformation requires an end-to-end focus on customer needs.
Digital Best Practice
Instead, the approach we recommend is in figure 3, which we’ll call digital best practice:
Figure 3: Digital Best Practice
In the diagram above, the organization has undergone the necessary transformation of its organization and corresponding processes, leveraging modern, Agile/DevOps techniques to achieve an end-to-end focus on the customer.
Complicating the technology story above, however, is the fact that most enterprises typically have legacy, on-premises assets that are best left on their existing platform – especially if that platform is a mainframe.
We call this bifurcation of technology the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ principle. While the bimodal IT pattern in figure 2 is a poor choice, simply thinking that moving from the ‘before’ picture in figure 1 to all-new technology is the best option for the business is also a recipe for failure.
Instead, IT leadership should carefully review both existing technology assets as well as requirements for new technology, and implement a hybrid IT architecture that properly represents both types of technology.
Such implementation requires modern tooling – tools that today’s collaborative, self-organizing teams following Agile processes are comfortable using. Unlike in the bimodal scenario where the slow Mode 1 uses older tools, in the digital scenario, everyone uses modern tools – even when working with legacy assets. Compuware Topaz is a perfect example of such tooling.
Digital best practice also requires a modern, architected approach to corporate data. While mainframes may still serve as the enterprise’s central systems of record, there may also be requirements to maintain data in modern, cloud-based systems like Salesforce or ServiceNow.
However, instead of the complex integration scenarios the bimodal anti-pattern requires, modern digital best practice properly abstracts and virtualizes corporate data across the board.
The Intellyx Take
The diagrams above are simplifications, of course – true enterprise environments are by necessity far more complicated.
In particular, digital best practice rarely breaks technology cleanly into two boxes. Far more common is a diversity of different technologies, each with a different strategy regarding modernization or migration.
It is in this real-word context, the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ principle is especially important. Replatforming existing COBOL applications, for example, is almost always inadvisable, as such a move rarely gains any benefit, while losing the bulletproof reliability of the mainframe.
Simply separating such mainframe efforts into slow Mode 1, furthermore, is also a bad idea.
However, we find that many senior-level executives nevertheless confuse the bimodal anti-pattern with digital best practice.
The reason: digital best practice may require the maintenance of legacy, on-premises assets while simultaneously calling for modern, cloud-native technologies. Superficially, such a move may resemble bimodal IT – but in reality, it means modernizing legacy assets like COBOL programs in place, by incorporating them into modern hybrid IT architectures and leveraging modern tooling to update older COBOL programs to participate fully in the modern, digital context.
As figures 2 and 3 above illustrate, furthermore, bimodal and digital best practice are in reality quite different from each other.
Yes, it’s possible to transform your people and your processes while simultaneously maintaining on-premises legacy assets as part of a coordinated digital transformation strategy.
If you have the right tooling, the right architecture, and you get the data right, you’re well on your way to digital transformation success – while maintaining mainframe assets well into the future.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Compuware and ServiceNow are Intellyx clients. At the time of writing, none of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper.
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