Author: Yauheni Soupeev

A leading German bank had a problem. They struggled to improve and extend one of their mission critical Mainframe COBOL applications.

They built this COBOL application — and the Mainframe as a whole — on a complex patchwork of tools and processes, developed ad hoc over decades. It was inflexible to change, and impossible to keep in line with changing business needs, and they were losing customers and market share because of it.

They knew they couldn’t solve this problem alone, and they ultimately chose IBA Group — an IT service provider with 30 years of experience with Mainframe and a specialty in modernization — to help them fix and update the application, take the support burden off IT, and modernize their Mainframe as a whole.

In part one, we walked through this problem in depth, and how the bank came to partner with the IBA Group mainframe teams to solve it.

In part two, we will explore:

• The five-step process IBA Group followed to fix the bank’s application and begin to modernize the Mainframe
• The initial outcomes the bank enjoyed from partnering with IBA Group, and what their next steps and ongoing work together look like
• The measurable ROI and benefits the bank experienced working with IBA Group

The First five Steps: How the Bank and IBA Group Fixed COBOL Application

IBA Group took the lead. They began with a simple — but proven and powerful — five-step process to fix the banking application’s biggest problems promptly while laying the groundwork for a broader, longer term modernization of their Mainframe efforts.

Step One: Achieving Alignment with the Business

This bank’s Mainframe sat at the heart of their operations. Modernizing it would touch every corner of their enterprise. This was more than just another IT project; it was a major business initiative. IBA Group needed to make sure they were aligned with the business leaders — and their broader goals — before they got started.

This was not always easy. The bank’s business leaders were worried that modernizing their Mainframe would be risky and might harm their operations. They wanted to postpone the project, and kept finding excuses to put it off.

To overcome these understandable concerns, IBA Group hosted many sessions with the bank’s IT and business representatives. IBA Group told the business that modernization of their Mainframe COBOL applications would bring big benefits, and ultimately was not optional. IBA Group emphasized that the market was not waiting and that their competitors were already far ahead. Finally, they agreed, and found the right time to start.

Step Two: Discovery

With the business onboard, the IBA Group agile teams could now begin the working process, starting with the Discovery step. IBA Group analyzed the business’ broader strategy, their needs and objectives, and how mainframe modernization could serve all the above. IBA Group assessed and took inventory of their existing state, identified limitations in their existing structures and processes, and developed both strategic proposals and a modernization roadmap.

Step Three: Support

Next, IBA Group went deep into the bank’s existing application. They wanted to see exactly how it worked, what it needed to deliver, and how they could improve and extend the application’s operations without breaking anything critical along the way.

To do so, IBA Group:

• Developed as much knowledge about the application as possible
• Analyzed its inbound and outbound interfaces
• Revealed its dependencies and relationships
• Reverse engineered its business logic (where required)
• Began to provide technical support of the application’s software helping the internal teams

By doing this, the IBA Group service teams learned the application — and its place in the business’ operations — inside and out, and felt ready to build something even bigger and better.

Step Four: Proof of Concept

IBA Group COBOL and DB2 teams were now ready to build a Proof of Concept (POC) version of the bank’s new solution.

To ensure that the Proof of Concept (POC) would demonstrate true value to the business, IBA Group conducted an analysis to determine which features of the application were most valuable to their end users. This allowed them to identify the key functions that needed to be included in the POC to showcase its potential and align it with the business goals. To accomplish this, IBA Group took the knowledge they developed in Step Three, and extended it further by:

• Analyzing the business logic validations and data flows needed to implement the new solution
• Reusing CORE business logic with existing code, added primary validations in Front, and coded IMS transactions
• Defining, documenting, and developing new APIs
• Developing a new frontend for the application based on the bank’s Company Brand Book and design principles
• Performing stress, load, and security tests of the prototype
• Defining the authorization and authentication approach to implement next steps

The POC was a success. It seamlessly integrated into the bank’s operations and delivered its required functionality in a faster, more efficient, and more scalable manner than the existing applications. Ultimately, this POC became the foundation that IBA Group extended and improved the new solution on.

Step Five: Incremental Modernization

With the POC in place, IBA Group took an iterative approach to move this bank down their Mainframe modernization journey. The IBA Group COBOL teams began to follow this step-by-step modernization roadmap to transform every stage of the software development process, to sunset retired modules and applications, and to automate the tests.

IBA Group ensured that every step in this roadmap delivered real value to the business, and slowly built a completely modern approach to COBOL applications on Mainframe.

Initial Outcomes and Ongoing Work

After completing these five steps, the bank already achieved some significant outcomes.

• Replaced a good number of their retiring Mainframe specialists with the IBA Group end-to-end teams
• Began to develop Mainframe applications faster (in particular by implementing Mainframe Test Automation and DevOps principles)
• Created a fully integrated solution by expanding the programming languages and technologies they supported for both Mainframe and the Web
• Ran legacy and new applications concurrently in production, side by side.
• Ensured new applications were compliant with their legacy database to allow simultaneous use of the database by both legacy and new applications

These outcomes are just the beginning. The bank is still early in their modernization journey, and continuing to work with IBA Group to reach their long-term goals.

One pillar of this partnership and strategy is the modernization of the bank’s IT department into a fully-integrated Agile approach. This involves transforming the customer IT department of 800+ employees and the IBA Group engineering teams from a traditional “Plan-Build-Run” approach to an Agile methodology.

Working with IBA Group, the bank’s IT functions were reorganized into domains with Agile Release Trains (ART) and Centers of Excellence (CoE) based on the SAFe model. The domains are based on lines of business and bracket the corresponding ARTs.

Each ART is composed of several agile teams, each structured around DevSecOps principles and responsible for developing and operating IT applications. Each ART will maintain IT security requirements, complete their tasks in close cooperation with the business line they serve and which assign them.

Looking forward, the bank plans to add six or seven more IBA Group end-to-end teams to increase their capacity by 50+ engineers. In addition, in 2022 the bank initiated a program to modernize some of the IBM designed legacy IT landscape with the help of additional IBA Group teams.

While these are large, long-term plans that will deliver huge changes and benefits to the bank, the teams and business as a whole underwent significant transformation and experienced substantial benefits to the operations.

What They Got: Key Benefits from Working with IBA Group teams

By working with the IBA Group agile teams, this bank has transformed the way they develop and maintain the COBOL Mainframe applications and expanded the ability to serve their customers.

Doing so, they achieved some key benefits.

They developed new features and capabilities. They retained all of the legacy application’s features, integrated these features across their business, and developed new functionality for the customers. By deploying APIs to integrate the applications and databases, they are now able to provide real time credit scores for the employees, and integrate Mainframe infrastructure like DB2 and CICS/IMS.

They also improved the fundamental performance of the banking solutions and enhanced the Credit Department’s efficiency by reducing manual data entry tasks, automating repetitive activities, and minimizing errors.

Their new solution is scalable, stable, and capable of supporting 3,000+ concurrent users.

They took a big burden off the internal IT teams. They handed most of the critical Mainframe tasks to the IBA Group end-to-end agile teams. IBA Group gave them scalable, cross-functional, self-managed teams that include Architects, Software Engineers, Business Analysts, UI/UX Designers, and Quality Assurance experts (and can include even Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and DevOps professionals as needed).

These teams are autonomous — IBA Group hires, manages, and optimizes the people. They now take care of all daily routines and support for the banks’ Mainframe COBOL applications, and made new feature development their number one priority. They tackle all change requests, develop all new features, and meet all changing requirements — without sharing resources, or juggling conflicting interests.

As a result, the bank improved their SLAs and the time to market, developed new features that attracted new customers and provided a higher level of service, and freed their internal IT teams to focus on strategic responsibilities. 

They delivered measurable ROI and business outcomes:

• Increasing the number of loans issued each day by 140%
• Accelerating loan approvals from 3-4 banking days to just a few seconds
• Reducing the time to onboard a new employee by three times
• Integrating more remote applications into the Mainframe
• Implementing CI/CD, and now delivering on demand (instead of once per month)

Bring These Benefits to Your Organization: How to Work with IBA Group

These results are not a fluke. At IBA Group, we have years of experience helping clients like this bank transform the Mainframe COBOL applications and legacy processes in order to accelerate the operations, expand the product lines, and grow their businesses.

To learn more about how to bring the IBA Group proven teams and processes to tackle your biggest Mainframe challenges, schedule a free, comprehensive consultation. During our chat, our experts will discuss the current state of your Mainframe, brainstorm opportunities to improve its performance, and walk you through what a partnership between your organization and our teams might look like. Reach out today.

Author: Yauheni Soupeev

A leading German bank had a problem.

They provided a wide range of financial services to individual, corporate, and institutional clients, as well as to the public sector. They specialized in a wide range of fields, and had grown over the decades to become a leader in their country and field.

Unfortunately, their legacy IT infrastructure’s limitations were catching up to them.

One of their key Mainframe applications was behind the times and nearly impossible to update quickly or easily. They were losing customers and market share, and they needed a solution — fast.

In this two part case study, we will delve into their challenges and explore how collaborating with IBA Group’s mainframe teams helped solve them, resulting in significant benefits.

In part one, we will explore:

• What improvements their key Mainframe application required and why
• What bottlenecks they encountered when they tried to work on this application
• Why their overburdened internal IT teams could not fix these problems alone
• What they looked for in a partner and why they chose IBA Group

A Leading German Bank Struggled to Update Their Key Application

The bank’s Credit Department operated a legacy OS/2 banking application on their Mainframe. They used this application to capture and store information about clients, loans, loan guarantees, credit scores, mortgages, and other mission critical data.

This application was central to the bank’s operational activities, and their Credit Department was looking to extend it. They wanted to improve its functionality and add new features to expand their client base, provide a wider range of loans, and accelerate and digitize new loan evaluations and approvals.

Yet when they tried to develop their application further, they ran into significant barriers. They quickly realized that their application:

• Could not adapt to their rapidly changing business environment. It was inflexible, and took a long time to implement new features, change business rules in the system, or even deploy minor changes to its operations.

• Could not integrate fully into the rest of their business environment due to the complexity of their Mainframe, putting the application data and functionality into a silo.

• Took too long to perform basic functions. Customers who made a loan inquiry had to wait two or three days to get any response from the bank, leading to increasing customer dissatisfaction and loss.

• Created a significant burden on internal IT. None of the application’s processes were fully automated, which meant IT had to perform a lot of manual work to get anything done — causing delays, errors, and development bottlenecks.

The bank’s Credit Department and IT teams knew they needed to solve these issues before they could expand their application’s functionality and improve its performance. However, once they began to attempt to untangle these knots, they realized their issues were more fundamental than they thought — and that they could not resolve them on their own.

The Problems Were Too Big for the Bank’s Internal IT Teams

The bank’s internal IT teams were talented, hardworking, and they wanted to help the Credit Department fix and extend their Mainframe application. Yet, they were not able to complete this project on their own due to a few bigger problems in their business, their infrastructure, and their legacy processes.

Specifically, the bank’s internal IT teams encountered four fundamental issues that prevented them from fixing this application on their own.

First, they were already overwhelmed with routine requests.

They promised the Credit Department — in good faith — that they would fix the application’s problems within one year and deliver the requested features. Yet they had limited capacity and often found themselves in conflicts of interest. They were constantly flooded by other change requests from across the bank’s org chart. These change requests were often prioritized — at the corporate level — above the application’s.

Second, they lacked the necessary skills.

The bank’s IT teams consisted of experienced, proven professionals who were good at their jobs. However, fixing and extending this application required rare skills that were not popular in the world of IT, such as the COBOL programming language. In addition, their skilled developers, who could contribute to this project, were already busy with their daily tasks and had no time for new development, in-depth analysis of the application’s issues, and exploration of new problem solving strategies.

Third, they were stuck in old approaches.

Like many internal IT teams — and especially Mainframe teams — they were locked into old school ways of doing things, in particular the legacy Waterfall approach to application development. This approach became a bottleneck for innovation and prevented them from evolving the application fast enough to meet the changing demands of their constantly shifting business requirements.

Finally, their Mainframe itself was a complex patchwork.

Like many banks, they had developed the Mainframe, its architecture, and its applications in an ad hoc manner over many years. As a result, in order to make any changes to their application they had to navigate a complex patchwork of different solutions. These included:

• Standard IBM technology stack

• Multiple programming languages including PL/I and COBOL

• VSAM and recently added DB2 databases

• IBM MQ as a primary messaging exchanger

• TWS (formerly OPC) as a scheduler

• CICS for transactioning

• And complex custom workflows (i.e. business applications built on CICS and PL/I, including conversational transactions written in a specially developed procedure language that automatically generated source code in COBOL)

In sum: IT was overloaded and understaffed, and their Mainframe was both complicated from an engineering perspective and had multiple technical blockages that prevented it from meeting a full range of business requirements.

Some members of the bank’s internal IT only saw one solution to this problem. They wanted to get rid of their Mainframe entirely and reengineer their systems from scratch using modern technologies.

The Credit Department’s business leaders vetoed this proposal. They had used their Mainframe for decades and appreciated its performance and security.

The business leaders won this debate. The bank decided to keep their Mainframe, but knew they needed to take a new, modernized approach to managing it and developing its applications faster and more efficiently.

They knew they could not do it alone.

Searching for a Solution: How the Bank Partnered with IBA

The clock was ticking. The longer the bank left their Mainframe application as is the more regular customers they lost to competitors, the harder it became to attract new customers, and the lower their market share dropped.

They began to look for an external partner that could reengineer their Credit Department’s application to improve its performance and extend its feature set, modernize their Mainframe as a whole, and relieve the burden on internal IT teams.

To start, they documented what any potential partner needed to help them deliver.

In the short term, they needed to serve their business better, develop quick solutions to complex problems, deliver rapid ROI, offer seamless service improvement to their internal users and customers, and minimize risks during the transition.

In the long term, over the next few years, they needed to reengineer their existing applications, maintain their existing business logic, and integrate their host applications with their remote applications.

The whole time they needed ongoing support from teams that could take care of their business’ daily requests and support tickets, as well as to modify their Mainframe applications and build APIs so users could access them via web UI.

With these requirements defined, the bank began their search, and quickly found IBA Group, a large IT service provider with a specialty in modernizing Mainframes.

The bank was drawn to IBA Group for their Mainframe open source initiatives, which involved the development of DevOps tools in partnership with Zowe, and their showcase of diverse Mainframe modernization solutions at the annual SHARE conference. In addition, the bank was impressed by IBA’s proprietary Appulse platform, which offered automated support for business applications operating on z/OS.

To get to know IBA Group, the bank had a series of screen, compliance, and discovery sessions with the future partner.

During these sessions, IBA Group helped the bank identify their core problems and proposed an optimal solution. IBA’s 30+ years of broad experience in Mainframe, along with their specific emphasis on system and application development, as well as expertise in modifying and migrating Mainframe systems to modern platforms, quickly became apparent to the bank.

The bank selected IBA as their partner, and got to work.

What Happened Next

By partnering with IBA, the bank was able to modernize their application and their entire Mainframe system, develop new features and capabilities, unload the support burden off their internal IT teams, and deliver measurable ROI including:

• Increasing the number of loans issued each day by 140%

• Accelerating loan approvals from 3-4 banking days to just a few seconds

• Reducing the time to onboard a new employee by 3 times

For more details on how the bank and IBA achieved these outcomes, check out part two of our case study.

If you are interested in learning more about how IBA can help you address your Mainframe challenges and attain similar outcomes, reach out to us now for a free consultation.

During our chat, our experts will discuss the current state of your Mainframe, brainstorm opportunities to improve its performance, and walk you through what a partnership between your organization and our teams might look like.