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– iTech Solutions (@iTech_Sol)06:12 – Sep 15, 2021

Over the years, each of us has made different investments into the development and advancements of our IBM i systems. Some have adopted modern practices and technologies but each of us has taken different approaches, putting us all at different starting points in developing our IT strategies. Application modernization means something different to all of us. For some, it might involve modernizing the user interface, code or database. For others, it could mean transforming RPG or CA 2E (Synon) to modern languages. Cloud, AI, IoT or open source are additional examples.

However you define it, many organizations that rely on IBM i applications have this in common: a need to improve agility, grow revenue and increase competitiveness, all while facing limited budgets, technical debt and skills shortages.

What would you say is the most important element in a successful IBM i modernization project? Would it involve sourcing the right solutions or using the best technology? How about having the right skills at your disposal? Of course, you’ll want to complete the project on time and on budget.

All of the above are significant factors, but having a well-crafted and clear IT strategy and IBM i roadmap is critical to digital transformation success and getting your project off the ground. In some cases, these initiatives require a significant investment of time, people, money and tools. Producing a strong business case helps rationalize investments and define the goals and requirements needed to get buy-in from the organization. A comprehensive strategy and roadmap with clear milestones of value delivery shows you the way.

What Is a Discovery Engagement?

When you embark on a modernization project, there are a lot of questions about how you’ll do it and how much it’ll cost. As we all know, in IT, the cost depends on what your desired end-state is and how fast you want to get there. Building a plan helps your organization understand how much it’s going to cost, why they should fund it, what value they can expect, and why now.

When we begin a Discovery engagement, our clients typically come with a strong idea of what they have and what they’re trying to accomplish. They might be trying to improve agility, enable new business functionality, move from green screen to web applications or find alternative solutions for sourcing readily available skills in the market.

As the collaboration progresses, we often find that the client has identified one or two pain points, but there’s more to explore to ensure they choose the right solutions and build the right roadmap. Here’s an example: Systems of engagement such as mobile applications and new web portals can be built as new front ends on an IBM i system. However, it’s important to consider the potential repercussions of building systems of engagement without treating the existing code & database and working with a system that’s not properly prepared to handle it – you may end up with stability or scalability issues.

When we work with a client who wants to modernize, we dig into what modernization might mean to them. We might ask, “What’s your company doing in terms of digital technologies? How has COVID affected your business? Has it required you to pivot or evolve in any way? What other market or competitive disruptions are affecting your business? How are you set up for resources?”

Consider the definition of the word ‘discovery’: It’s the act of finding something that hasn’t been known before. We often discover that what a client thinks they want differs from the reality of what they need to offer real business value. These strategic discoveries lead to far more successful projects.

Why Make a Business Case for My Modernization Project?

Most of our clients come to us acknowledging that they need a detailed strategy to defend the “why now” versus “five years from now” question to their organization. They might have started by looking at tools, which is very common with IBM i shops because many of our clients are developers.

It’s helpful to have a strategist guide you through building the business case. Part of this involves creating an IT strategy, but it’s important to also look at the business strategy. When you work at both levels to build a business case that addresses real business pain, chances are much higher that the company is going to fund the initiative. Bringing together all the stakeholders in the company and an external partner can bring credibility to the strategy, the process and to IT. Figuring out who can benefit most from modernization helps identify business champions and project sponsors.

A strategist can help you define what you need to accomplish by helping you build your IT strategy and IBM i roadmap. We’ll work together to answer questions such as: What are your organization’s ambitions and what will they support? How can we best drive those goals forward? What problems are we fixing? How does this deliver quantifiable value to the company? How can we deliver value now and not after two years of heavy lifting? What is the best approach? What sequence of activities is right for the business?

Ultimately, the organization wants to know how much, and that is dependent on the solution that comes together as we collaboratively develop your strategy and roadmap.

To find out how much, we need to know what we’re doing and how much of it we have to do. That brings us to the second part of the Discovery process, which involves analyzing your code. We can discuss using automated tools that can quickly remove dead code and expose design patterns, the data model and the complexity of your system. This also helps us define what might bring the most value. Most companies have 20–50% dead code that is a waste of your investment. This is a vital step in creating a modernization strategy that would bring the most value.

Examples of What’s Possible:

What To Expect From a Discovery?

Ideally, a Discovery session should help you understand where to focus efforts and drive the best value. You should consider the modernization solutions that are available for web, APIs and cloud as well as agile development processes. Creating a roadmap and ascertaining some quick wins will help boost your momentum. Building and layering your plan in stages can help you clearly demonstrate the value of modernization to the business.

Possible Roadmap Scenarios

Fresche’s Discoveries are based on collaborative workshops. There are a lot of elements for us to explore together, including the business, your system, your applications and how they’ve evolved, the state of your database, the overall health of your code, your staffing and skills and where you want to go.

These workshops have two elements:

Education: Our strategists are here to educate and facilitate. Instead of handing you a cookie-cutter strategy, we present the available approaches, technologies and end-states as well as their pros and cons. Our role is to share what other clients have done and advise as to what might be risky.
Collaborative Strategy Development: Once you understand what’s possible, we collaborate on the best path forward. We work together to define the requirements from both the IT and the business perspectives, while providing parameters around what the end-state and journey would look like. Finally, we evolve those requirements into a solution that has a budget, a resource plan, and a schedule.

Why Work With A Strategist?

Occasionally, we’ll have insights that you might not be aware of yet. For example, we’ve done a lot of work with financial institutions and in fintech. This has given us first-hand knowledge about the industry, regulations, trends and technologies – this helps us fill any gaps and guide you.

While you might know what you want to do, it can be helpful to have an expert working alongside to point out blind spots or confirm assumptions. Quite often, we see that IT and the business are disconnected, and a Discovery engagement helps realign them.

Initial consolidation exercise and multiple activity tracks

We’ve also had clients say they’re going to develop the strategy themselves, only to come back after months (or even years), because they’re missing key elements or need broader experience that doesn’t exist within their IT departments.

Other clients say, “We know what we want to do and we’re going to go do it.” A year later, they are way off schedule: they might not have fully assessed the effort required, or they realized they didn’t have the skills. They might not have been aware of tools that could have mitigated significant amounts of manual effort. This is where time-to-market might run long or costs rise to unsustainable levels and you run the risk of the business shutting your project down. If you don’t have the right plan and the plan is not rooted in experience and realistic effort models, your odds of sticking to that plan are low.

The value that comes from having a comprehensive strategy is clear. World events are forcing companies to look at where they are spending money and want to be certain that they are taking on strategic activities that will bring value. Having an IT strategy and IBM i roadmap can ensure that you’re leveraging your mission-critical RPG, COBOL and CA 2E (Synon) applications while taking advantage of modern technologies, enabling innovation, improving maintainability and mitigating risk.

Fresche is hosting a limited number of free whiteboard sessions for organizations who are looking at upcoming modernization projects and want to have a preliminary strategy session to discuss their options. You can register here.

The post Planning for Success: The Importance of an IT Strategy and IBM i Roadmap appeared first on Fresche Solutions.

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 37  IT Jungle

As we continue our focus on the critical role IBM Power ISVs play in supporting the Power 10 launch, I would like to highlight innovations with ISVs that go beyond performance optimization to how we are extending capabilities around AIX solutions with OpenShift on Red Hat, enabling IBM Power as a platform for mission critical data management solutions, and driving continued competitive advantages with ISVs for our AIX and IBM i clients.

Application modernization

Any application modernization effort requires a strong ecosystem of software to provide developers the ability to leverage new innovations and position their business to realize efficiency and flexibility gains.

Finacle customers have long relied on IBM Power to run their mission-critical core banking workloads. As banks face pressure from demanding customers and competition from fintechs, they are innovating to handle an increased demand for digital banking and more personalized services. Finacle Digital Engagement Hub provides customers who have long relied on Finacle Core Banking on AIX with a system of engagement with analytics-driven customer experiences across channels, applications, and devices. The Digital Engagement Hub is a cloud-native workload deployed with Red Hat OpenShift and can be delivered on the same infrastructure as the core banking workload, allowing for a highly flexible solution offering with very low latency.

Kelly Switt, senior director of Financial Services Industry Strategy, Ecosystem and Strategic Partnerships at Red Hat explained that, “We predict the future of digital banking will be built on the ability of FSIs to innovate at scale while retaining stable and reliable operations. Red Hat OpenShift running on Power10 can provide a production-ready, cloud-native foundation that fosters innovative offerings like Finacle Digital Engagement Hub, supporting banks and financial institutions in driving the next-generation of personalized services without impacting operational stability.”

Power10 based systems provide a solid foundation for application modernization. The consolidation and dynamic scaling capabilities enable customers to run systems of record side by side with Red Hat OpenShift based applications, allowing for a highly agile and flexible experience. Power10 is designed to allow customers to incrementally modernize by extending the value of existing applications on AIX, IBM i and Linux while starting to surround them with new cloud-native apps at their own rate and pace. Customers are able to leverage existing investments while also reaping the innovation, technology and economic benefits of the Power platform as the technology stack is modernized.

Mission-critical data management

Customers have utilized IBM Power for over 25 years with mission critical databases. The introduction of Power10 builds on the industry leading reliability of IBM Power, ranked most reliable for 12 years by ITIC1, with the delivery of innovations like Open Memory Interface and inter-node SMP fabric.

Reliability is incredibly important as customers begin evaluating the modernization of existing systems of record to open source databases (OSDBs) like PostgreSQL and MongoDB. On database modernization, Eric Cargol, VP NA Commercial Sales and Global IBM Alliance at EnterpriseDB expressed how “Customers are increasingly using PostgreSQL as their database of choice to accelerate innovation and meet business objectives. EDB’s enterprise-grade PostgreSQL, coupled with IBM Power’s top ranked reliability and investment in hybrid cloud, makes Power10 a great option for flexible and scalable growth of EDB environments. We are aligned with IBM and committed to supporting our joint customers across their modernization journey.”

Leveraging enterprise distributions of popular OSDBs like PostgreSQL and MongoDB provide the support and tools needed for deploying mission-critical databases, whether they are new applications, re-platforming, or legacy database migrations. Undertaking the shift to commercial OSDBs with IBM Power and our ISVs minimizes the risks customers face with an extremely reliable system that maximizes availability and performance while minimizes outages.

IBM i ISVs excited for Power10

The IBM i operating system team has an incredibly strong customer base and ISV ecosystem. Current innovations focus on numerous areas, including application modernization, along with ongoing enhancements in Db2, RPG, and open source integration. The latest IBM i is designed to benefit from Power10 performance and throughput gains for single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. Future work with Power10 and IBM i includes the exploration of on-chip compression and crypto accelerators. Ross Freeman, Product Manager and IBM Strategy Leader for IBM i partner, Infor, shared his excitement around Power10, “As a long-standing ISV of IBM Power, Infor is excited by the industry-leading innovation in the new Power10 systems. With thousands of clients running on IBM Power today we look forward to continuing our relationship with IBM and the benefits Power10 will bring to our mutual clients.”

AIX leveraging Power10 technology

The IBM Power team ensures that each operating system, AIX, IBM i, and Linux all take advantage of new Power10 functionalities. The AIX operating system team has a history of collaborating with ISVs for roadmap enhancements that help them optimize and build value around their solutions. This collaboration is demonstrated in the recently published IBM Power10 whitepaper. Other examples include enabling open source technology, performance and scale features, services for integrating with Power capabilities such as hardware acceleration of encryption and compression, and support for IBM’s next generation of advanced compilers with features for Power10 optimization and acceleration of machine learning and inferencing solutions.

>> Click HERE to learn more about Power10.

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