Many companies today are focused on modernizing their legacy applications, but this largely consists of taking assembler or spaghetti COBOL and turning it into more efficient, better structured COBOL. Unfortunately, these applications will still be hard to edit, hard to change, and won’t deliver the strategic agility that companies need.
Decision Management builds on SOA by externalizing decisions from operational systems and managing them separately as Decision Services. Using either the mainframe’s ability to execute Java-based business rules or the generation of COBOL supported by a number of leading vendors, you can use the same basic IT system infrastructure but replace hard-to-maintain COBOL with easier-to-maintain business rules and a business rules management systems (BRMS). Furthermore, you can bring the business users who know what changes are required into the process to make the changes themselves for dramatically increased agility.
Legacy modernization with Decision Management is also an excellent place for many companies to get started with advanced analytics. A BRMS is the technology platform for delivering advanced analytics to operational systems via Decision Services.