Modernization Workbench®
Modernization Workbench creates business intelligence for application portfolios
The Modernization Workbench creates a centralized, always-current warehouse of business and technical intelligence about the applications that run your business.
These insights allow your team to identify and execute development activities that re-align applications with business priorities.
Application Modernization Business Value
Application portfolios automate the operations of every organization. Business processes from corebanking to claims processing have become indistinguishable from the applications that execute them. So it is essential to modernize these applications to align with the business strategies and goals of the organization.
But for most large organizations this kind of flexibility is simply not possible. Applications have grown so technically complex that they cannot be modernized without significant cost and risk. To address this challenge requires business intelligence about your application portfolio. The Modernization Workbench delivers:
Application Modernization Usage Scenarios
Application Modernization can take many forms, depending on your business needs. You may combine outsourcing, redevelopment, and SOA enablement as your ideal approach. Or, you could return applications to application maintenance mode, retire them, or replace them with a packaged application.
Regardless of your path toward modernization, there is one common requirement. You must have rich business and technical intelligence about your application portfolio. This insight helps guide the whole modernization lifecycle, including:
Application Modernization Business Value - Detail
Applications are valuable because of the business functions they perform. As a result, it is imperative to manage your applications as 'business assets'. The Modernization Workbench offers multiple capabilities to extra business intelligence from existing application portfolios. This insight enables the entire application modernization lifecycle.
- Business context: The platform also enables users to understand and govern how their business processes are actually executed by their application portfolio. Users can overlay business contexts onto their software. This metadata can 'tag' artifacts, transactions, and other entities with business meaning. Now, users can view and analuzer their application portfolio by groupings like business process, geography, or service provider.
- Business rule mining: This function allows analysts to locate, document, and organize the business rules embedded within their systems. Users can quickly relearn how their applications behave in support of core processes.
- APM - technical insight: As the Modernization Workbench analyzes application code, it collects a wealth of technical metrics, including complexity and size data. This application portfolio managementinformation can be combined with survey data and information from other sources to provide true key performance indicators about your application portfolio.
- APM - related insight: Intelligence from other sources can be important for executing development tasks. For instance, managers want to know where to focus programmers. Data about cost, opinions about application value, and bug counts can be imported into the platform. Stakeholders can be surveyed to collect information about cost, value, and risk. This provides rich intelligence that can help guide portfolio governance decisions.
Unlike niche tools that provide simple scans of your enterprise applications, the Modernization Workbench offers a comprehensive approach. It generates detailed application structural models of existing applications across diverse environments - from COBOL, PL/I, and Natural to PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and Java. The platform richly parses source code, tracing complex relationships between programming entities.
Global IT organizations -- including outsourced teams -- have instant access to the same intelligence about their application portfolio. This slashes miscommunications and costs, and ensures that development activities are executed quickly and per business requirements.
Built on an enterprise-class, OMG standards-based repository, the Modernization Workbench was built for large organizations. Users can include even the largest application portfolios into the platform for analysis. This ensures that you have one warehouse of intelligence about your application portfolio.
Metadata from other tools in the SDLC can readily access and populate intelligence into the platform via an SDK. So, adding parsers to support other languages is streamlined. Data from tools like Project Portfolio Management and Source Code Management tools can be connected to provide a complete view on your applications.
The Modernization Workbench provides a "Batch Refresh Process" that updates the repository with the latest sources. This technology ensures that analysis is based on the most current information about the portfolio. And because the repository can be remotely accessed, global teams of analysts, developers, and management all have access to the same current intelligence.
This information only becomes true application portfolio business intelligence when it is presented to the 'right user' at the 'right time'. CIOs will have different information needs from business analysts and development staff. Similarly, teams that are working on different projects will have specialized information requirements. Feeds can be filtered to provide the correct information to users throughout the development organization.
- Assessment and management reports: Summary inventories and assessments allow executives to determine where misalignments exist between goals like availability or efficiency and the reality of their applications. For instance, management may discover a large amount of critical applications are built on a burning platform. These applications may be prime targets for modernization.
- Development teams: Business analysts need always-current, always-shared information to better communicate business requirements and technical challenges. Developers need to understand the targeted applications, locate potential impacts, create test cases, and more. Information feeds can be configured to supply different users with the intelligence they need to complete their key tasks.
- Related development technology: Collaborative development environments are significantly more useful when they can be connected to business intelligence about applications. Software tools that directly relate to applications but ignore the reality of the application code itself are drags on efficiency. However, when used in concert with business intelligence about applications, they provide an extremely powerful combination
Application Modernization Usage Scenarios - Detail
Aligning application portfolios with management goals is the primary aim of CIOs. The process of aligning applications with strategies is called the modernization lifecycle. The lifecycle consists of understanding, managing, modernizing, and maintaining enterprise application portfolios.
Understand Enterprise Applications
Enterprise applications tend to become more complex and less understood over time. Documentation gradually loses its relevance, subject matter experts move to other roles, and the pressures of daily maintenance lead to rising complexity. This impairs management's ability to develop an application modernization roadmap that aligns applications with business priorities.
The Modernization Workbench answers this challenge with thorough inventories and documentation across the application portfolio. The platform demystifies millions of lines of code, offering dynamic visualizations and powerful reports on even the most complex legacy enterprise applications. In fact, customer-led ROI studies have shown that the Modernization Workbench generates documentation 70% more quickly than manual approaches.
Further, users can rely on the Modernization Workbench to harvest business rules and business processes 74% faster than alternative methods. Users can also overlay 'business context' onto their software assets. This groupings organize software assets based on how they support business processes, where they are managed, and other meaningful groupings.
The resulting models provide further insight into the structure and behavior of an organization's operations and their underlying applications. Armed with these details, managers can focus effort and resources on core business priorities, and plan their path to flexible, efficient, and modernized enterprise applications.
Principal modules deployed:
Application Portfolio Management
Enterprise applications automate the very core operations of today's businesses. As a result, it is imperative that managers employ effective IT governance over their application portfolios. This application portfolio management permits managers to make intelligent decisions regarding paths to Enterprise Application Modernization that yield the most value from their existing applications.
The Modernization Workbench offers metrics dashboards that give users detailed insight into where applications diverge from business goals. Managers can rely on this data to determine which applications and business processes should be priorities for modernization activities, like SOA enablement or outsourcing, and which should be returned to maintenance.
Unlike high-level scanning tools that merely offer surface details about the application portfolio, the Modernization Workbench provides a complete solution. Once the Modernization Workbench has enabled decisions to be made, other professionals can drill deeper into the Modernization Workbench's repository and functionality to execute the selected legacy application modernization and application maintenance strategies.
Principal modules deployed:
Application Modernization
The next stage in the Enterprise Application Modernization lifecycle is to execute on the identified opportunities. How an application or business process is modernized can take many forms. For some organizations, modernization may involve redeveloping an application in a better-supported language. The Modernization Workbench enables this activity through analysis and business rule and process discovery that speed the transition of applications' essence to redevelopment specifications.
For other organizations, modernization may involve leveraging business processes in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Modernization Workbench accelerates these initiatives through SOA-focused analysis and the ability to isolate business logic into SOA-ready components. For still other organizations modernization may involve retiring a non-core process from the application portfolio. The Modernization Workbench speeds this process by analyzing interfacing systems that could be impacted by the retirement.
Regardless of which of the many paths to legacy application modernization that an organization takes, the Modernization Workbench accelerates the initiative. Unlike niche vendors that enable just one form of application modernization, the Modernization Workbench enables a broad spectrum of initiatives -- increasing your flexibility.
Principal modules deployed:
Application Maintenance
The average organization spends 60-80% of its budget simply maintaining existing systems. To encourage application efficiency and operational flexibility, these organizations must liberate resources from inefficient maintenance practices. The Modernization Workbench enables this through rich analysis and documentation capabilities that improve the efficiency and responsiveness of maintenance teams. In fact, customer-led ROI studies have shown that large change requests are completed in as much as 50% less time than with alternative approaches.
The Modernization Workbench also provides insights for managers to locate, understand, and specify application maintenance. Developers can bridge the gap between technical reality and business requirements through the Modernization Workbench's unparalleled ability to abstract business insights from existing applications. Once executed, the Modernization Workbench repository ensures that business knowledge is retained, keeping knowledge retention levels up. This is especially important as companies struggle to keep domain expertise following outsourcing and employee retirement.
Principal modules deployed:
| Rich, interactive analysis allows users to quickly understand their applications in detail. |
| Business contexts allow users to understand and analyze their applications from business perspectives like process, geography, security, outsourcer, and more. |
| Users can construct and share queries that probe the application for elements of interest, like dead code, non-compliant constructs, and more. |
| Users have instant access to a variety of reports and visualizations to help better understand existing applications. |
| The powerful querying engine allows users to locate elements of interest and discover misalignments with corporate coding standards. |
| CIOs have instant access to business-level intelligence about the application portfolios. |
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Managers can 'zoom-in' to a business context to refine priorities and scope projects. |
 | Metrics can be easily tracked and trended over time, allowing users to monitor adherence to Service Level Agreements and spot issues.
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| Business analysts can document and organize rules into useful hierarchies. |
| Automated, patented business rule discovery locates logic in 74% less time -- and more completely -- than manual approaches. |
| Multiple patented rearchitecting methods allow users to automate the process of componentizing and renovating their complex application portfolios. |
| Users can quickly isolate existing logic into reusable business logic, paving the path to SOA. |
| SOA Analyzer helps users uncover strong candidates for reuse. |
| SOA-specific analysis allows architects to locate architectural issues that could block service-enablement. |
