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Enterprise IT and modernization for flexibility by Dr. Daniel Sabbah, General Manager, IBM Rational Software

Businesses need to change to stay viable and IT must enable this flexibility. Modern application architectures based on SOA are one way to deliver more responsiveness to corporate lines of business. At the same time, enabling governance and managing the risk of delivering software is becoming a top requirement for global lines of business and IT leaders. In this article, I’ll share how the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform unifies IT development communities to address their challenges – from the uncertainty caused by the influx of new "enterprise developers," to supporting SOA-based construction of new applications across multiple platforms, all while right-sizing investment and downsizing risk.

Enterprise pressures and opportunities
Let’s take a closer look at the business environment enterprises face today. In a recent IBM global survey of CEOs, 87 percent predicted their industry would face fundamental change in the next two years. However, 83 percent of those same CEOs predicted that the fundamental change in their industry would be initiated by a company other than their own. This indicates not only the need for change but also the pressure to adapt and react quickly to a dynamic, competitive marketplace.

The pressure can be relentless, but with those challenges comes opportunity:
Commoditization is a factor for almost every industry, whether products are produced or services provided, but technology can add value and thereby limit, or even reverse, the effects of commoditization;
Competition can come from halfway around the world, but so can new market opportunities – thanks to improved analysis, flexible distribution channels and faster time to market.
If 83 percent of CEOs are correct and new opportunities are introduced by other companies, then the speed with which they can enter the market, offer superior products and services becomes critical because they can still extract maximum value from that opportunity in the long-term.

The key to unlocking these opportunities will be driven by the companies’ organizational agility, flexibility and adaptability. IT is a key to business processes and may hinder or dramatically accelerate organizational opportunities.

Governing the business process of software delivery
The CIO’s increased emphasis on business transformation also increases the need for effective governance. Innovative organizations take risks and they need to manage these risks. The degree of risk is inherent in activities like geographic expansion, sourcing work to partners, product-line expansion and even complying with government regulations. The challenge is balancing innovation and oversight, while ensuring that all aspects of the business are well-governed.

This is not a new challenge. What is new is the dependency on software to achieve this balance. Organizations are using software-based, best-practice processes to streamline and transform operations while improving oversight and reducing costs. At the same time, IT is being asked to grow the business by extending value with new products and information. The bar has been set higher for IT. Not only do IT practitioners have to be technology experts, they now have to be business experts and entrepreneurs, as well.

The IBM Rational software strategy is largely about governing the business process of software and systems delivery. Any business process requires governance, and software development and delivery is no exception. This means we now need to measure, understand, deliver, support and improve the process of software delivery. Without this rigor and insight the goal of IT flexibility – enabling governance, delivering flexible solutions and leveraging communities – likely, will not be achieved.

But CIOs are faced with a conundrum. Measurements, reporting and analysis provide a façade of governance. The real key is determining “what” are the valuable and meaningful elements to measure. An example came to light with the recent trend of iterative development. Organizations ended up confused because they often had no clue as to what they were proposing, delivering or measuring in each iteration. In addition, they were unsure whether each iteration was increasing or decreasing risk to the business.

When I discuss Rational solutions, it’s usually governance in the context of creating business services, because if you’re trying to evolve toward a service-oriented enterprise, you will likely fail if you have no governance or very weak governance. Governance needs to begin long before you do any service-based modernization, transformation, extension or evolution.

Software delivery matures
IBM Rational has over twenty-five years of experience in software engineering and modern software development practices, along with IBM years of experience in developing software for System z environments. In the early days, our focus was on individual developer productivity. As IT has matured, we have shifted our focus to include team productivity, organizational effectiveness and, ultimately, to business flexibility. In support of this IT maturation, we have introduced processes, team infrastructures and tools that collectively enable the team to work more effectively to deliver high-quality software on time and on budget.

IBM Rational software now helps organizations automate, integrate and govern the core process of software and systems delivery via the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform. This platform comprises products in four life cycle categories: Architecture management, change and release management, process and portfolio management, and quality management.

We are applying the Rational tools and capabilities to the software development life cycle, and helping businesses elevate their skills, maturity and flexibility. We are also helping companies improve individual and team productivity, increase software delivery predictability, and expand project and process management to globally and temporally distributed teams.

The connecting point today of governance, business value and the IT organization is Service Oriented Architectures, or SOA. The key element of an SOA is an effective alignment of business and IT. SOA requires that application development teams focus on software delivery in the context of the business goals they are trying to achieve. So, we’ve added global process and project management to the Rational portfolio.

We’re also extending our capabilities in team collaboration. An example is our Jazz effort, a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating tasks across the software lifecycle. It’s being developed using a new approach and vision for development called open commercial software development. Unlike traditional processes where customers have little visibility into a new product or release until it is shipped, Jazz is being developed openly. Customers can see the development as it occurs and can download builds as they are available. Visit www.jazz.net to learn more.

Rational, System z and modernization
The mainframe environment is extremely important to many of our enterprise customers. Its excellent qualities of service, huge portfolios of existing applications, and very large developer community are key to an organization’s business strategy.

The Rational team was recently expanded with hundreds of System z developers. We are now expanding our reach across the Rational segments including change and release management, quality management, process and portfolio management, and architecture management. We are focused on enhancing governance and life cycle management – whether the environment is a pure System z platform or a mixed one that includes System z and distributed systems.

As we initiate new efforts, System z will now be an integrated element from the start. An example of this is the previously mentioned Jazz imitative – we are ensuring the platform will run on System z and support the work styles appropriate for System z developers.

Meeting modernization challenges of System z business
Modernization and flexibility are the goals, but the reality is that most companies face a number of challenges in attaining this desired state. As we work with customers from around the world, we see the same set of challenges and the Rational Software Delivery Platform is continuing to be enhanced to address them:

The asset challenge
The first challenge for businesses going through any kind of transformation or modernization effort is understanding and having access to an inventory of their software assets. Since the software systems running the enterprise have likely been developed over several decades, creating this inventory can be a daunting task. However, without one, IT flexibility is greatly impacted. For example, if a company must rely upon human memories and ad hoc code scans to determine the impact of a change, the risk of making that change and the time to do so are an order of magnitude higher than where a software asset inventory exists.

There’s a phenomenon we’ve named “software archaeology” to take into account both the legacy and generational shift of applications. Many of us build multi-tier applications that have multiple generations of technologies: COBOL, PL/I, Java, C/C++, EJBs, Web and Web service artifacts. In fact, some shops now view EJBs as Java legacy! Basically, the code you write today is tomorrow’s legacy. Therefore, having a software asset management process built into your application life cycle management process will ensure that information about both existing and new code, models and test cases is readily available when the need for a change occurs.

Our asset modernization solutions focus on solving several problems: program understanding, impact analysis, and extracting value. For example, our WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer provides graphical views of code structures, making it easier for new employees to become productive with an existing body of code. This solution also provides impact analysis that helps project managers or lead developers understand the impact of a change in seconds rather than days or weeks, and they get the same answer every time (which will not be the case when relying upon human recollection). A recent improvement to our solutions has been to support impact analysis across technology boundaries, such as understanding the impact to a JSP and Java code when a COBOL copybook is changed.

Finally, our Rational Transformation Workbench helps our clients tap into the value of their existing assets by identifying and extracting business rules, identifying potential services which allows them to be surfaced for reuse. Just as importantly, we are able to identify obsolete dead code which can be deleted which drives greater efficiencies for ongoing maintenance.

The architecture challenge
Industry data suggests that SOA architectures can cost less to implement and save 50 percent or more with each reuse when compared with traditional component-based development methods. Unlike architectures of the past, SOA does not require complete rewrites or “rip and replace” style implementations. Instead, SOA is about enabling software as a service, and in many cases, the most effective way to achieve this is by reusing code from existing systems. In fact, analyst studies have shown that creating services from scratch costs about five times more than creating it from existing systems. Given the large volume of code on System z, this is an especially cost-effective way to expedite the move to SOA while dramatically lowering overall risk.

The Rational architecture modernization solutions assist in the move toward SOA in a sensible yet accelerated fashion – something we call “Smart SOA.” To get a quick start down the SOA path, we provide modern IDEs that offer a broad range of SOA features, such as wizards for creating Web services from existing code, including COBOL and PL/I, and a visual wiring editor for creating service flows amongst CICS transactions. When creating new services, we offer language-level service support in our new, modern business language, Enterprise Generation Language (EGL). A service created in EGL can be deployed to CICS, WebSphere Application Server, and, when desired, exposed as a Web service.

The skills challenge
There are millions of developers in the world that have the knowledge of how to create and enhance applications for System z. However, the skills of most of these developers binds them to working only on certain projects, such as a CICS and COBOL project, a PL/I and IMS project or a Java and WebSphere Application Server project. We call these “skills silos.” Having groups of developers that work only on certain projects because of their programming language and middleware knowledge, limits overall IT flexibility since developers cannot readily be applied to projects according to business priority.

At Rational, our skills modernization solution is built around the concept of a Platform Independent Model (PIM) specification of applications which allows companies to leverage the knowledge of their existing developers across a variety of platforms and programming languages. By using a PIM, a multi-platform application, possibly containing elements for CICS, WebSphere Application Server and even the browser, a complete system can be specified without requiring the developer to have lower-level language or middleware knowledge, such as CICS and COBOL, WebSphere Application Server and Java, or Mozilla and Javascript. Our PIM support is provided by EGL within Rational Business Developer, supporting creation of System z, Linux, UNIX, Windows applications and more without the need to be an expert in any of these platforms.

For existing System z developers, the use of EGL allows those that know your business to create applications, and then you can decide whether to deploy to CICS, IMS or WebSphere Application Server depending upon business need. Of course, many System z developers are nearing retirement age, so EGL makes it possible for new developers to build applications for System z without having to learn COBOL, PL/I, CICS or IMS. Therefore, IT can achieve flexibility among the development staff, as well as with the assets themselves.

Programming languages and middleware skill requirements limit the flexibility of staff, but so do the types of tools and development platforms in use at most enterprises.

Silos of development
Based on meetings with hundreds of customers each year, the pattern that I see most commonly are islands of development in the IT organization. The typical organizational model is that different groups are responsible for System z development, Java, C/C++, .NET, and so on. This separation was initially created in the early client-server days, and it has expanded with Web development. As separate groups have grown, they have typically used almost completely different tools, processes and team infrastructures. While the history of how this has occurred is understandable, this organizational and team platform duplication limits the ability of IT to move people from project to project based upon business need. Most importantly, this duplication results in increased costs, and makes it almost impossible to have basic levels of visibility and traceability to resolve quality problems when building multi-platform systems.

Our solution at Rational for team infrastructure and process modernization is to help our customers move onto a consolidated, best-of-breed development environment. For example, we have extended our industry-leading ClearCase source management solution to support COBOL and PL/I, allowing customers to consolidate distributed and mainframe source into a single repository. On the process front, we have extended our Rational Unified Process to support System z. For the developer, we have modern, high productivity Eclipse-based IDEs for all platforms, including Rational Developer for System z, which provides support for COBOL, PL/I, HLASM as well as J2EE, Web, SOA, and XML.

The investment challenge
About 78 percent of the typical IT budget is devoted to simply maintaining existing applications, but we’ve already discussed that the rate and pace of competitive business dynamics necessitates flexibility and adaptability. Unlocking more of the 78 percent maintenance budget is crucial to driving increased flexibility. The largest chunk of investment in IT relates to people costs. In many organizations, people investment is flat. Through the use of new technologies and capabilities staff, can ultimately do more, enabling organizations to move beyond their limited budgets and the cost of skilled staff. IBM is building delivery environments that allow organizations to take much greater advantage of the people that they have and the skills that they have without spending a lot of extra money.

Organizations want to devote more resources to new development, rather than maintenance. At the same time improving overall organizational productivity is the real key to modern IT success. Driving visibility and collaboration in software delivery involves ultimately improving returns on both software and people assets. Let’s look at how Rational is addressing these challenges and needs.

The Rational solutions
The WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer is used to understand assets and relationships, along with the Asset Transformation Workbench, which allows you to harvest and re-factor assets and discover new potential, such as by reusing assets as Web services.

Once assets are categorized, they can be managed and further developed in the Rational Asset Manager. It lets you categorize and publish assets, retrieve information about the metadata for those assets, and define a lifecycle and approval process for usage of assets. Finally, as service assets move through the lifecycle into production they populate the Service Registry and Repository delivered from the IBM WebSphere brand.

The above describes a “green thread” or use case, which is a well-thought-out scenario that we’re driving through our tools to solve a significant problem. The above approach may sound general, although the tools themselves are oriented and designed for System z.

Many customers will find value in our “on ramp” for SOA and System z. With IBM WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services you can create Web and Web service applications without changing the underlying legacy processing.

Supporting modern architectures in a more complete manner, we have Rational Developer for System z, which allows developers to create rich Web and client applications, Web services from existing CICS and IMS applications, and supports back-end business processing in System z transactional environments. Its newest capabilities include Web Services orchestration, specifically targeted towards CICS applications. We also have a new general language, EGL, an evolution of the popular business languages we’ve been building for many years. Its focus is on business development by business developers. When you create new applications in EGL, you can more easily leverage your current skills, build out via a standard language, and then target multiple deployment environments that include all of the middleware and capabilities of System z.

We are also integrating our System z specific development environments with Rational Software Architect and Data Architect, to help with model-driven development for applications based on System z. By using use cases and scenarios that drive greater integration and efficiency, you can leverage model-driven development to get you from idea to code faster.

If your goal is improving quality of SOA environments, you can use Rational Tester for SOA Quality.

Lifecycle management is also critical, and our flagship ClearCase Change Management environment is enabled for System z composite processing environments.

Once applications are validated and ready for production, a recent Rational addition, BuildForge, can be used to deploy applications across multi platform environments including newly delivered agents for System z.

Conclusion
We are starting to break down the silos to enable focus on greater innovation, alignment with evolving business priorities, and helping staff to bridge their discrete worlds. The result is that businesses can now use these capabilities to develop and deploy multi-tier applications that target multiple platforms, middleware and do it across multiple environments.

We’re as excited about our industry as you are. As we move together into an ever evolving world, I hope to work with you on our common goal of increasing the importance of IT as a business process.

About IBM
International Business Machines Corporation is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.

IBM has been known through most of its recent history as the world's largest computer company; with over 350,000 employees worldwide, IBM is the largest information technology employer in the world. It is also the most profitable, but in revenues it fell to second place behind Hewlett Packard in 2007.

IBM holds more patents than any other U.S. based technology company. It has engineers and consultants in over 170 countries and IBM Research has eight laboratories worldwide. IBM employees have earned three Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. As a chip maker, IBM is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

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