New Compuware Maturity Model, White Paper Challenge Organizations to Rethink the Mainframe

Jan. 30, 2014 - PRLog -- DETROIT--Jan. 29, 2014--Compuware Corporation , the technology performance company, today announced it has published a white paper titled, “Enterprise IT Performance Maturity Model: Embracing the New Normal of Mainframe.” The paper explores a new maturity model that helps organizations assess and improve the processes for managing application performance and costs as distributed and mainframe systems converge. The white paper also cites common challenges organizations are facing, including a transitioning workforce and complicated trouble shooting – and suggestions on how to overcome them to improve their process and technical maturity. The model and white paper were created in collaboration with veteran IT journalist and blogger Alan Radding.

Maturity Model – a Closer Look

To help organizations identify areas of improvement, the model combines distributed open systems environments with the mainframe and recognizes increased workloads, approaches, processes and tooling. It defines five levels of maturity – ad hoc, technology-centric, internal services-centric, external services-centric and business-revenue centric – in five critical IT areas: application technology, mainframe attributes, organization, performance technology and process.

Organizations at the ad hoc level primarily use the mainframe to run core systems and employ a green screen approach to application development. At the technology-centric level, there’s an emphasis on infrastructure monitoring to support increasing volumes, higher capacity, complex workload and transaction processing along with MIPS usage. As organizations progress from internal services-focused to external services-focused, mainframe and non-mainframe systems converge and end-user experience (EUE) and external SLAs become a greater priority. Finally, at the business centric level, the emphasis shifts to business transaction monitoring where business needs and EUE are addressed through interoperability of the mainframe with mobile and cloud systems. Here, technologies provide real-time transaction visibility across the whole delivery chain and the mainframe is viewed as a revenue generator.

“Most IT organizations will likely find themselves in multiple maturity levels for the various categories,” said Kris Manery, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Compuware Mainframe Solutions. “However, if an organization achieves higher levels of maturity in application technology, but remains at lower levels in organization, they are likely still approaching the mainframe and distributed environments as separate worlds, which leads to slower problem resolution times, increased costs and slower revenue growth.”

About the Compuware Mainframe Solutions

Compuware's Mainframe solutions help the world's leading organizations maximize developer productivity, minimize costs and deliver better service. The Solutions are available within the Compuware

Workbench, an open development environment that features an intuitive and easy-to-use graphical user interface. Workbench makes common mainframe tasks faster and simpler to perform for both experienced mainframers as well as those new to the mainframe, enabling companies to develop new services faster, more efficiently and with higher quality utilizing existing resources.