Mainframe mismatch

These are among the findings of research and analysis conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Compuware.  According to the study, “As mainframe workload increases—driven by modern analytics, blockchain and more mobile activity hitting the platform—customer-obsessed companies should seek to modernize application delivery and remove roadblocks to innovation.”

The survey of mainframe decision-makers and developers in the US and Europe also revealed:

• Growing mainframe importance
  • 64 percent of enterprises surveyed will run more than half of their critical applications on the platform within the next year, up from 57 percent this year.
  • 72 percent of customer-facing applications at these enterprises are completely or very reliant on mainframe processing.

• Loss of essential mainframe staff
  • Enterprises have lost an average 23 percent of specialized mainframe staff in the last five years.
  • 63 percent of those positions have not been filled.
• Failure to prioritize velocity and efficiency
  • While 55 percent of respondents cite application quality as “extremely important,” only 42 percent put the same emphasis on development velocity and 46 percent on efficiency.

• Failure to measure critical KPIs
  • While firms recognize the importance of quality, velocity and efficiency, significant percentages are not measuring them (Quality: 27 percent, Velocity: 38 percent, and Efficiency: 39 percent).

• Customer experience disconnect
  • 59 percent say that improvements in quality, velocity and efficiency mean a better customer experience; yet only 31 percent see this focus actually decreasing customer-discovered defects.

These findings and others suggest that mainframe investments, culture and management practices need to evolve significantly in light of changing market realities. Insufficient emphasis on velocity, for example, is a holdover from an earlier era that predates the demands of today’s fast-paced digital economy. Inadequate attention to efficiency likewise reflects an era when the mainframe development and quality assurance staffs were significantly larger and extraordinarily stable.

According to the Forrester study, “Mainframe is alive and growing at the heart of many businesses. IT decision makers cannot afford to treat their mainframe applications as static environments bound by long release cycles, nor can they fail to respond to their critical dependence on a retiring workforce. Instead, firms must implement the modern tools necessary to accelerate not only the quality, but the speed and efficiency, of their mainframe, as well as draw skilled people to work on the platform.”