State departments of transportation help facilitate industry operations, commerce, and community life by maintaining all major modes of transportation. Many are now facing a significant challenge to delivering their mission: upgrading the legacy systems that support critical business processes. Mainframes, which have been around since the 1960s, have been used to handle data processing and other administrative workloads. While highly reliable and long-lived, mainframes are also inflexible and expensive to maintain, which is why many IT leaders want to pivot to the cloud.  
 

One state’s Department of Transportation has been working on this transformation journey for a few years now. They are currently seeking to adopt commercial off the shelf (COTS) solutions to replace some of their business process mainframe applications, which require updating interfaces and changing integrations. To do so, they needed to start by understanding their legacy applications.
  

The agency decided to start by focusing on a mainframe application that is currently used to support consumable inventory: recording equipment data such as maintenance costs and how systems are used. By modernizing these capabilities, the agency will be able to share data with partners and flexibly update business policies to keep pace with evolving requirements. To accomplish this goal, the agency turned to Auctor, an IT consultancy and longtime partner who works with a variety of best-in-breed solutions in order to achieve their client’s goals. Upon understanding the agency’s requirements for this project, Auctor decided to engage with EvolveWare and use their Intellisys platform for the initial phase.

• A lack of legacy programming talent: With only two part-time staff who understand legacy programming languages and maintain the agency’s mainframe, the agency lacked the bandwidth to tackle the project. 
 
   
• An absence of technical application documentation: The agency has evolved its mainframe applications over time, with input from different contributors. This institutional knowledge, however, only resided with staff. They lacked up-to-date documentation of the source code that would enable leaders to fully understand the applications, key dependencies, database access and sharing details, etc.  
   
• Need to understand systems across multiple legacy and modern languages: The agency was looking to understand applications and their dependencies written across 4 different programming languages including legacy languages such as COBOL as well as more modern languages such as C# .NET.