Many companies today are focused on modernizing their legacy COBOL applications, but this largely consists of taking assembler COBOL and turning it into more efficient, better structured COBOL. Unfortunately, these applications will still be hard to edit, still be hard to change, still won’t deliver the strategic agility that companies need.
Decision Management builds on SOA by externalizing decisions from operational systems and managing them separately as Decision Services. Using either the mainframe’s ability to execute Java-based business rules or the generation of COBOL supported by a number of leading vendors, you can use the same basic IT system infrastructure but replace hard to maintain COBOL with easier to maintain business rules. Furthermore you can bring the business users into the process to make the changes themselves for dramatically increased agility.
Legacy modernization with Decision Management is an excellent place for many companies to get started with advanced analytics. Take-aways:
- You don’t need to modernize the whole application!
- Decision making components are often the highest change, most difficult to maintain pieces of mainframe systems.
- Externalizing these components using a business rules management system dramatically reduces the maintenance costs of a legacy application while improving its agility and positioning you for re-platforming later.
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