A consistent theme of my time in federal and state government, and large private corporations too, is that mainframes are horrible and must be replaced at all costs. This flies in the face of the fact that all of Western civilization is humming along on them just fine right now. I have actually never, not once, seen a successful complete mainframe deprecation (being able to convert the mainframe into a literal coffee table).
Instead of fighting them, here are five ways to make your mainframe work for you.
- Meet the people who maintain it
Do you know the names of the people who keep your mainframe humming? If not, you should. They are generally unsung heroes in any agency — unknown, underappreciated, and actively criticized (by everyone’s focus on getting rid of them). They’re leaving in the middle of church to run a report and working around the clock to keep everything running in crunch times.
I was once on a crisis engineering project where the team who hired us had spent two years trying, and failing, to connect to the mainframe and extract data in any meaningful way. They didn’t understand the data headers or connection process, despite having tens of full-time engineers dedicated to the project. My team and I quickly realized that the people who had been running the mainframe for the past nearly 40 years had been sitting across the room the whole time. Nobody had ever tried to meet them or ask for their help.
- Spit out a spreadsheet
Mainframes are great at spitting out structured data. Yours probably does this tens or hundreds of times a day already. If you share the data you’re looking for (whether to run a report or to power new functionality), it’s very likely the mainframe can generate a spreadsheet of that data on a consistent schedule for you.
- Send it back a spreadsheet
Similarly, mainframes can readily consume structured data. Maybe you’ve found the interface for updating information too difficult to use. You may be able to create a new interface, save the data in a consistent structured format, and send that spreadsheet back to the mainframe on an hourly or nightly basis.
- Use a collaborative work management tool to make it all sing
You don’t need custom, complex tools to pull out or even to send back data from your mainframe. Once you can generate and import spreadsheets, a simple SFTP server may be all you need. Off-the-shelf collaborative work management software already exists (and is already FedRAMPed) that can handle this data shuttling, even for sensitive information. With the permission of IT and the assistance of the existing mainframe maintainers, I’ve seen a single person use one of these tools to build really powerful new reporting and information collection tools in under a week. I believe that the faster you can get to the first version of implementation, then you can refine and iterate from there.
- Use the strangler pattern as needed
The strangler pattern, coined by Martin Fowler, is in my view the only actual way to reduce reliance on older technology (mainframe or not). Instead of trying to replace the entire thing at once, you start by identifying one end-to-end process that you can reproduce in a new system. This allows you to shut off this one piece of the mainframe. Then you repeat with another process, and so on. It’s highly likely that this new system will still interact with the mainframe, such as by sending and/or receiving data about this process on a nightly basis.
I’ve seen this work particularly well for processes like checking status of a claim, submitting an application, or generating letters — eventually piecing off entire chunks like the entire application flow.
Marina Nitze, co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy, is currently a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis engineering firm that specializes in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina is also a fellow at New America’s New Practice Lab, where she works on improving America’s foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. Marina was the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education.
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