With ever-increasing digital demands, application modernization is top of mind for many organizations, particularly those with mission-critical applications running on z/OS. Many z/OS enterprises have large investments in applications that they rely on to run their business. After many years in existence and multiple changes, these apps can often be highly complex and tightly coupled with data and other applications – but are well tested, proven, and critical to the business.
While modernization can take many forms –changing programming languages, implementing DevOps pipelines, implementing REST APIs, etc., decision management can also be a valuable component of a modernization strategy.
IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) for z/OS has optimized runtime options for integration with z/OS applications to help ensure operational decisions are:
- Easy to author and change
- Executed in real time at high scale
- Consistent with documented policies & regulations
- Deployed consistently, whether on Cloud, in a distributed environment or in a native z/OS environment with COBOL or PL/I; CICS, IMS and z/OS batch applications.
With easy-to-use, low-code decision management tools, business users are able to implement decision policies, test and execute changes in ODM without disrupting application code, freeing IT teams to focus on revenue-generating activities rather than time-consuming, ongoing maintenance. Organizations are therefore able to become more responsive, more efficient, and more transparent in their decision making.
Discovering decision logic
In z/OS modernization projects, one key challenge can remain. Often business applications have grown and evolved over the years with no reliable documentation. In these cases, it can be challenging to identify the code embedded in the application that make up the business decisions that we want to extract and externalize to manage in a decision management environment.
IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI) provides a suite of capabilities for application modernization. ADDI uses cognitive technologies to analyze mainframe applications, searching source code and enterprise artifacts to quickly discover and understand interdependencies of changes. It includes business discovery capabilities to help identify of data elements used within the application as part of the embedded decision and map of these to business terms, plus powerful search capabilities allow the discovery of the code within the application actually implementing the logic of the business decision.
Together these offerings help complex business applications adapt quickly to change without costly development and testing cycles so they can truly evolve at the speed of business.
Three ways to learn more
- Attend “Modernize from the inside out: How digital decisioning can improve agility in your Z applications” webinar at 11am ET on March 22 to learn more about how ODM and ADDI can help your organization improve business agility by discovering and automating decisions.
- Get a free, 3-day trial to see these products in action:
- Join IBM community groups:
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