SearchSOA has reported on the saga that one county in Virginia underwent in the attempt to update its old mainframe system. The way the source describes it, the decision to pursue mainframe modernization grew from the cost of not doing it: had they ignored this need, they would have ended up spending too much money on a system that didn't fit their needs and was difficult to maintain.
This area, Arlington County, managed to make the leap through outside sources that were able to assess the current systems and the changes that had been made to them over the years. Although it seems to have been comfortable for the county to stay with this familiar solution that it had adapted to over the years, it was inadequate in meeting the evolving IT needs of the Department of Human Services.
Writing for FCW, Anthony Robbins commented on the need for any mainframe project to stay up to speed with the most recent options offered by technology. This means recognizing the roles that advances like server virtualization can lend to federal IT projects, especially because it can help to reduce costs. On the user side, being aware of the newest approaches for legacy access, such as pure HTML5-based terminal emulation, is also key as this can prevent the need for full modernization in many cases.
"For all the advancements we've seen in consumer technology and enterprise applications in the past couple of decades, government networks have remained largely unchanged," he writes. "That slow pace of technology adoption is affecting both system management and portfolio development, and leading many people to ask about the next step in the government's innovation agenda."
IT modernization needs to be deployed to encourage your organization's technological development. There's a chance that you have simply become too dependent on the old ways without really realizing it, and that turning to an easy virtualization tools that modernize the user interface to one based on .NET can begin a process of higher efficiency.