Core Business Transformation Rationalize

Applications written in COBOL currently automate and carry out the business operations of most major commercial, industrial, and governmental organizations around the world today.

These powerful core business systems have been developed, enhanced, and refined over the course of many years, even decades, to support ongoing and emerging business needs.

The Rationalize stage enables discovery and preservation of existing core business application assets. Rationalization can involve a number of approaches appropriate to the transformation envisioned including:

• Discovery - Mine knowledge and provide documentation of the application structure in preparation for additional transformation opportunities.  Information gathered can document existing applications or be further abstracted into the business domain if required. Discovery can find hidden assets for reuse and facilitate preservation of intellectual property embedded in the application portfolio.
• Refactor - Improve existing applications without changing language or platform. Objectives include removing inaccessible business logic and data to facilitate future application updates, lowering overall maintenance costs, and driving additional efficiencies.
• Translate- Translate existing application functionality using a highly automated tool to reposition the application in a composite application environment to gain improved agility.
• Wrap - Encapsulate in place functionality that continues to support established business processes in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) harness.  This approach can realize significant business value by retaining investment in existing core business applications with lower risk and very cost-effective return on investment (ROI).
• Replace - Replace carefully selected applications with new custom or packaged solutions integrated with existing core business applications to drive enhanced flexibility.
  Orchestrate - Orchestration is the process of composing new services from wrapped and newly replaced or enhanced services into a cohesive integrated business process framework.
• Retire - Rationalization may uncover some applications that may be candidates for obsolesce as the functionality no longer supports any ongoing business processes.
  In fact, multiple approaches may be used in a project to achieve the desired business results in an evolving core business transformation strategy.

Discovering Existing Application Assets

Discovery is almost always the front-end of the Rationalization stage. In most cases, existing knowledge of the application structure and business rules need to be documented as first step to enable additional transformation steps to occur.

Generally, Discovery employs a process that uses the Relativity Modernization Workbench^TM from Relativity Technologies, Inc. to rapidly document and analyze your COBOL applications.

Discovery brings a multitude of benefits including:

• Identify opportunities for significant improvements
• Gauge how much effort is needed to solve the targeted business issue
• Improve application knowledge
• Prepare for future transformation opportunities
• Reduced cost of maintenance

Altogether, this process demystifies your applications by providing an interactive “walkthrough.”  And, you get a better understanding of any gaps between your business processes and IT strategies.

Benefits and ROI at the Rationalize Stage

• More streamlined, modular, and manageable applications drive lower maintenance costs with more investment directed at future innovation
• It becomes less time-consuming and thereby less costly to apply any incremental changes
• Transformed applications can be enabled to become flexible components in an evolving SOA framework using the unique Unisys SOA for ClearPath approach.
• Response to dynamically changing business opportunities are substantially enhanced

What’s more, the resulting application gives you an excellent foundation for additional transformation steps  with far less risk involved.