Empowering your Enterprise Systems Management Team to be Innovative and Best-in-Class
Your organization has systems helping manage enterprise-critical activities and information – and your team is the key to keeping these systems vital. Sustaining the rapid pace of business and technology is crutial to your company’s success. Let’s look at how you can make change happen and build knowledge within your team, empowering them to take your enterprise systems to new frontiers.
Chances are you have a wealth of valuable business information in your systems. It’s equally likely that people in departments around the company have ideas of how the systems can be made better. When the ideas, the information and the goals of the company come together, this can be a powerful motivator for change. Then, your team has the responsibility of making change happen.
This discussion will focus on three areas for simple, but powerful system enhancements:
- View, Extract and Analyze Information
- Streamline Business Processes
- Leverage Existing Skills and Tools
Business Process Integration Using “Virtual Users” – Risks and Rewards
The first part of Paul Conte's eBook trilogy “Transforming IBM i Applications – Your Journey Beyond Modernization,” introduces the concept of “virtual users” – referring to the technique of “wrapping” an existing 5250 interactive application with code that intercepts and controls the 5250 data stream. The technique can be implemented in a “batch” program, without any required access to a physical 5250 terminal or emulator. The “batch” program becomes the “virtual user” – a robot that can then do the bidding of another application.
The “virtual users” technique is commonly applied in the context of application modernization, and can offer compelling benefits including:
- Fast and incremental delivery
- Low risk and low cost, relative to alternatives
- Target strategic elements of the application that deliver the maximum business benefit
- Reuse business knowledge and rules that are already encoded in the 5250 application
When considering application modernization strategies, it would be unwise to overlook the potential of “virtual users.”
But what about applying “virtual user” techniques in your Business Process Integration (BPI) solutions as well? Is it valid to do so? Is it wise? Why would you do so, and what are the risks and rewards? Let me propose some answers . . .
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Legacy Asset Management and Transformation
Legacy Asset Management and Transformation is the practice of maintaining older application assets so that you can continue to derive value from your stable line-of-business applications – while executing a plan to gradually transform and possibly even replace them. A common goal with this approach is to move forward in a cost-effective, low-risk fashion.
Many IT organizations struggle to keep up with the demands of day-to-day maintenance and operations. In a survey of RPG development shops run by MC Press Online a couple of years ago, 65% said they missed maintenance deadlines annually. Meanwhile executives expect IT to not only maintain a stable business environment while reacting to frequent changes, but to also ensure the company stays competitive in their industry with eCommerce, Web services/EDI, operational/business process improvements such as workflow, mobile solutions, social media integration and whatever comes next.
Although legacy applications may be born out of stagnation by maintaining the status quo (sometimes for decades) and not taking an application forward as technology and business progress into new areas, there are often solid business reasons why this has occurred. For example, lack of resources and budgetary constraints are often factors plus the legacy application may be uniquely suited to the business and difficult to replace. So while doing nothing will be detrimental over time, there may also be reluctance to take any significant steps to change and possibly destabilize the mission-critical systems.
If your IT shop has been consumed with managing a legacy environment and day-to-day operations such that there has been little time or budget for innovation and improvements, you will benefit from building a plan for Legacy Management and Transformation to ensure that your business remains competitive in the rapidly changing world of technological advancements affecting commerce today.
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How to Justify Application Modernization to your CFO – Episode 3
This blog series unveils the steps needed to make an ROI-powered business case for Application Modernization to your CFO. Prior episodes outlined your current resources, your goals and the first 5 steps of the process, culminating in a Project Scope or Requirements Analysis.
Output from this Project Scope included:
- Business Vision Statement
- Non-functional Requirements
- Functional Requirements
- Design, which depending on the project may include a Data Model, User Interface, Workflow, etc.
- Report of all Project Risks, and how they will be addressed
- Prototypes, to address identified risk areas and draw out early feedback and support
- Project Plan, perhaps in MS Project format, with all known tasks, resources, dependencies, effort
- Project Management Methodology, including meetings, archives, time reporting, quality, etc.
However valuable this output is, it arguably pales in comparison to Step 6 – ROI Calculations.
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Building applications for mobile devices
These days almost everyone has one or more mobile devices, ranging from Smartphones to tablets. From a business perspective, widespread use of mobile devices is useful, as it allows immediate access to information for employees who work remotely and/or travel frequently. Customers also have easy access to information about products and services.
While the “App Stores” offer thousands of mobile applications, employees need mobile applications that will integrate with line-of-business (LOB) applications and unstructured information. Mobile applications built for customers, must help them in their relationship with the company by informing them about the status of purchases, providing information about products and allowing customers to ask questions or place orders.
Developers who work with RPG or COBOL on IBM i servers will find building applications for mobile devices a very different experience. Mobile devices are smaller, operate on a limited power supply, store much less data on the device and human interaction is touch. The devices have additional capabilities including cameras, location awareness and gyroscopes. Mobile applications can be browser based, native to the mobile device, or a hybrid of both. Native applications written for mobile devices don't use RPG or COBOL as the development language, and the device constraints require different application architectures and design principles.
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