Infosys: Driving Enhanced Business Value through Mainframe Modernization
Infosys Technologies has been leveraging over 20 years of mainframe and Microsoft experience in helping its clients modernize their legacy mainframe environments. Infosys develops IT-enabled business solutions to transform its clients’ IT function from siloed, tactical operations to a global, strategic function. Infosys’ mainframe modernization solution, part of its Catalytic Solution suite, has been successfully deployed in multiple customer environments.
We recently caught up with Colin Pinto, Head, Legacy Modernization Solution, and Prasad Joshi, Head, Microsoft Technology Center, to get real-life perspectives on the objectives of mainframe modernization, the challenges associated with such projects, and how financial firms can derive true business value from it.
Colin, mainframe modernization is largely perceived as an IT-only initiative. What value can businesses derive from such an exercise?
Any modernization exercise will be successful only if it can deliver benefits to the business. Mainframe applications were built over decades to automate the execution of specific activities. This is now constraining financial services firms where imperatives such as improving customer intimacy, achieving straight-through processing (STP), and enabling multi-channel delivery are critical.
Mainframe modernization enables companies to better leverage the underlying data and business rules to achieve these goals. Businesses benefit from this increased agility, enabling them to launch new products and services, achieve STP and improve overall access to information.
What challenges do financial firms face when undertaking modernization? What has changed today that makes this proposition more compelling?
The challenges we see in our customer engagements can be categorized broadly as organizational, financial and technical. The typical issues are about the lack of comprehensive knowledge of the existing systems, complexities due to multiple dependencies between the IT systems, inability to effectively utilize existing team skills, and the availability of budget for modernization.
Any modernization initiative will result in significant changes to legacy systems. It is a difficult decision for any executive to make.
The good news is that IT processes and technologies have evolved significantly to provide radical approaches to reduce the risk and cost of modernization. Mainframe modernization can now largely be a self-funded exercise by leveraging contemporary and cost-effective IT platform options and global sourcing models (see Fig. 1). On the technology front, the maturity of tools in the market has enabled companies to better understand and transform their legacy systems. This has lowered the risk of modernization initiatives.
What is the intended goal of a mainframe modernization initiative?
Mainframe modernization initiatives stem from the need to reduce IT costs or align IT with existing business processes. We strongly believe that the larger objective of modernization is to evolve the IT landscape to make it flexible enough to support current business needs as well as enable rapid innovations for the future. To this end, service-oriented architectures and business process management should be established as the end state. Multiple modernization projects, which get executed over a period of time, should be aligned to deliver such an end-state architecture. It is finally about modernizing legacy systems, legacy architectures and legacy processes. That is where the true benefits of mainframe modernization will be achieved.
What is the most critical element required to successfully execute mainframe modernization?
In my experience, a mainframe modernization initiative necessarily requires executive sponsorship in order to succeed. While financial and technical challenges can be managed much better today, it is organizational challenges that can cause a mainframe modernization effort to fail. We believe mainframe modernization should not follow a big bang approach, but should be a multi-year program executed in a planned and phased manner. Executive vision and support becomes most critical to make this happen.
Prasad, what motivates financial firms to undertake mainframe modernization? Can you describe some typical customer engagements?
We see mainframe modernization being driven as a result of one or more of the following – business initiatives that impact existing mainframe systems; IT transformation and cost reduction initiatives; or concerns about the availability of skills to manage and maintain the existing legacy systems. Some typical customer engagements are shown in Fig. 2.
What are the first steps that customers should consider when starting a mainframe modernization initiative?
Mainframe modernization can be a very complex project to initiate from an organizational perspective. It is helpful to have internal proof-points that drive the decision-making process and broaden the scope of the project to extend to the entire enterprise.
Think big but start small: The intent should be a broader move toward SOA, but smaller steps need to be taken initially. One might start with a cost reduction exercise because it can produce real savings in a short timeframe. Another advantage is both the business and IT managers will see the modernization initiative in a positive light. Keep in mind, however, that executive buy-in is imperative to ensure the success of the initiative.
What capabilities should customers look for in a mainframe modernization partner?
The critical success factor for such projects is to have strong program management skills. Today’s modernization projects involve multiple stakeholders, and disciplined and risk-mitigated pro-
gram management plays a key role. We also have observed that more often, these programs have significant impact on and involvement from business users.
It is extremely important to team up with the right technology partner who has domain expertise and knowledge of best practices in process improvements and business metrics. The partner should fully understand mainframes and contemporary technologies to enable the project to be successful, and have a wide pool of resources with the skill sets to handle the multiple complexities of existing mainframe systems. Finally, the partner should have the ability to maintain and support existing applications as modernization plans proceed. It is critical to be able to bring in specific technology expertise, such as business rule extraction and application re-hosting, in order to offer a range of suitable options.
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