Westfield Insurance, a leading property and casualty (P&C) insurance company in the United States, was founded on rich tradition and the cultivation of lasting relationships going back 176 years. The company was established in 1848, when a small group of Ohio farmers joined together to form an insurance company founded on integrity, trust, knowledge, respect, and stewardship.
In January, we interviewed Keith Haynes, Mainframe Technology Lead with Westfield, who shared with us some of the successes his team has had in the last year in modernizing their DevOps value stream to accelerate delivery of their hybrid cloud solutions with higher quality, while minimizing risk.
Their business drivers for change were speed to market, cost to value, meeting business SLAs, leverage current assets vs replatform, and removing the exposure and pain associated with the hand offs, along with the coordination, between mainframe and distributed. Westfield supports over 100 mainframe developers in a mix of offshore and in-house resource. After a value mapping of what was resource intensive and standing in the way of accelerating speed to market, they realized they had a need to focus on testing and modernizing the developer experience to become more agile. Previously SCM (source control management) administration and upgrades were all done in house by the mainframe team. Their handling of COBOL, HLASM, JCL and custom code took months of coordination and testing to deliver the new features and capabilities required to accelerate their property, casualty, agricultural and specialty insurance business.
In their planning of this modernization project, they started from the vantage of “beginning with the end in mind” and willingly embraced continuous improvement.
While the insurance company uses some offshore development experts, the on-premise engineers hold the strings and control the vision. On the distributed side, the enterprise was already using some services from Azure DevOps. Westfield includes the mainframe and cloud as part of their hybrid cloud strategy, architecting for best fit and qualities of service.
Westfield Insurance is dedicated to making a positive difference in customers’ lives and creating innovative solutions to exceed customer expectations. One can only exceed customer expectations with high quality software that has been delivered on time. They recognized the need for automation. This imperative requires standardizing pipelines for speed and includes automated testing as part of that toolchain.
To achieve their goal of increased automation, they needed the flexibility and simplicity of Git. Rolling out phase one of their pipeline migrated their mainframe applications from a legacy library manager to an enterprise standard for all of Westfield, Azure DevOps. That provides the path for test automation. They incorporated code scans in phase 2 and with plans to incorporate test frameworks in near future. However, on the z/OS side, they didn’t have the right foundation to focus on testing, therefore their first target was to put an automation framework in place.
Their goals for this foundational modernization were to:
Mitigate Risk - The source code management system had to be easy to upgrade.
Improve Efficiency - The conversion to a standard CI/CD pipeline must increase efficiency and speed up application development processes, while simplifying coordination of test and delivery of hybrid cloud applications.
Streamline Operations - A CI/CD pipeline must allow for streamlined operations, reducing the likelihood of errors, and ensuring consistency in development processes.
Save Costs The implementation of a CI/CD pipeline leads to a significant reduction in long-term costs associated with rising software spend.
Journey to Solution
The team started with a Proof of Concept in 2021. Assisted by IBM Technical sales and the DevOps Acceleration Team, they needed to demonstrate that developers could handle COBOL, HLASM, and custom code to easily do builds and deploys, by using IBM’s Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS (ADFz) for the complete developer’s workbench and added elements of automating the pipeline workflow using Git, DBB (Dependency Based Build) and IBM DevOps Deploy.
Git is an open distributed version control system that provides a common SCM tool for hybrid application architectures that can span across components ranging from those implemented in traditional mainframe languages such as COBOL, PL/I, or Assembler, to components for the service layer to reflect the architecture of the business application.
Results
With the full support of Westfield management, it took them 6 months to migrate all their mainframe applications to an automated Git workflow, while they worked in parallel on other activities like training, culture shift enablement etc. Parts of the distributed side of the shop also moved to Git so they now have an enterprise wide SCM capable of supporting modern hybrid development.
Increased efficiency - By streamlining the onboarding of outsourced development and standardizing on common application lifecycle management and development tools, they have increased developer productivity by 20%
With new developers coming in and their strategic use of outsourcing, there is less need for knowledge on underlying systems and more value assigned to business knowledge they bring to the organization, thus opening up the talent pool and supporting their ability to sustain velocity.
Improved visibility and auditability - The automated deployment capabilities allows the ITSM team to track hybrid deployments for a number of departments, making it easy to roll back deployments if necessary.
Saving Costs - In migrating from their legacy library manager they are saving $120k annually in current licensing fees, and the upgrade perspective was decreased using new compiler options to manage batch and online conversion packages. In addition, they can add more capabilities to the new pipeline, something they did not have in the legacy library manager before.
Today they use Azure DevOps as their source code repository of choice and Jenkins for orchestration in that public cloud. As the cloud has evolved in security, and Azure DevOps has improved their feedback loop, Haynes is thinking of redoing the pipeline and eliminating the need for Jenkins. See figure 1 below to understand their current architecture.
Best Practices
As with any IT project there are some practices Haynes flagged as key, and others he would improve upon if they were to take on a modernization project today.
1. Leadership buy-in and cultural change are critical.
2. Training - Get Power users (T3), who are open to change, acting as accelerators for this transformation and make sure that questions from the development teams could be addressed quickly. This flattened the learning curve and open house AMA’s were helpful as a communication path.
3. Leverage IBM people and resources - Call on IBM for enablement and guidance. They all want your success.
4. Eliminate “not best practices” -Initial footprint had 2 iterations using feedback into the group.
5. What can I automate, focus on integration, feedback and enablement - Setup SCM so that anytime production was updated, they would get notified.
6. Understanding capacity is key to prioritization and efficiency.
What’s next?
Remember the “end” they were working towards? Westfield is starting to work on automated testing in the pipeline. Now that they have a modern DevOps pipeline they are looking for ways to make the pipeline better and support end to end testing. They are also exploring generative AI to modernize, develop efficiently, and understand the impact of change on their code base.
Westfield is focused on enabling a DevOps automated testing capability while balancing costs, to meet industry requirements for speed and compliance. They have embraced the concept of Continuous Improvement, meaning the ongoing process of identifying and implementing small, incremental changes to improve the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of Agile practices and processes. I look forward to updating this post as their journey continues!
Explore solution components:
ADFz/IDzEE Product page
IBM DevOps Deploy
IBM z15
Z Day presentation: How Westfield Insurance Manages their Hybrid Transformation Efforts Using Cloud and On-Premise DevOps
Z DevOps Acceleration Program
Whitepaper Git branching model for mainframe development
Blog: A "no-baggage" approach to new Mainframe development practices
Continuous Integration Solution page
Continuous Delivery Solution page