BrainBlog for BMC by Jason Bloomberg
The greatest roadblock to modernizing applications on the mainframe is fear. Fear that making any change, no matter how minor, will break something.
Given that older, monolithic mainframe applications are typically mission-critical – core bank transaction processing, airline reservation systems, insurance ratings, and claims management, to name a few – IT executives are understandably reluctant to touch such apps at all.
It’s no wonder: Many of these applications are extraordinarily complex, consisting of layers of code from decades of development work, in many cases following no consistent coding or documentation practices over the years or decades they have been running the business.
Furthermore, as mainframe professionals retire, their organizations risk the loss of their tribal knowledge – perhaps the only knowledge of how many mainframe applications work. What was once a maintainable application suddenly becomes frighteningly opaque once the experts leave the building.
Despite such challenges, evolving business needs mandate ongoing updates to legacy applications on the mainframe. Regardless of their fear or loss of seasoned personnel, it’s time for today’s mainframe teams to take the plunge and leverage modern tooling to modernize mainframe applications in place.
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