The challenges of legacy applications
Within many organizations, critical business applications running on mainframe applications are essential to day-to-day operations. In many cases, these applications were originally created many years ago and the code has been continually revised by different people who have been responsible for maintaining them over time.
The challenges?
Application knowledge went with people who are no longer there; poor documentation makes it difficult to verify specifications against implementations; years of maintenance results in “spaghetti code”.
No structured or modular organization of code, with little or no separation of data, logic and presentation; business policies and decision logic are hardwired within the application code.
Applications built in departmental or functional silos without integration or extensibility considerations; inability to cater to the ever-increasing need to open up applications and integrate systems in the value chain.
How Operational Decision Management can help
Operational Decision Management focuses on the automation and governance of frequently occurring, repeatable decisions that control the actions of critical business systems. It addresses the challenges described above by separating decision logic from core application code. This allows decisions to be treated as enterprise assets that can be managed through a defined, documented lifecycle.
The result?
- Improved governance and compliance – decision logic can be managed through a central repository, making it visible, auditable and clear to both IT and the line-of-business subject matter experts..
- Improved maintainability – changes can be made in the business logic layer without affecting on the application layer, while also accelerating the implementation of changes.
- Consistency and reuse – this approach ensures consistent enforcement of business policies across the enterprise and enables reuse of decision logic across applications and systems.
