Data-Driven Transformation in European Government Institutions

Belgian ICT trend watcher Data News has highlighted a study from Pure Storage surveying hundreds of government ICT leaders from Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK, which revealed that about 40% of people surveyed do not believe their current IT infrastructure is future-proofed enough. In an age where people interact more and more with their government institutions through technology this is bound to create issues.

All government institutions work with extensive mainframe databases that have been updated, migrated, merged and patched over the course of decades to keep up with increasing technological demands. Often these legacy systems are now reaching the limit of their functionalities. This could be due to lack of available replacement components or skilled employees for this (from an IT perspective) ancient technology, due to lack of capacity and processing speed or due to the inability to communicate with current 21st century devices and applications.

About half of the ICT managers surveyed pointed out that they plan a major overhaul and upgrade of their data strategy and ICT infrastructure in the next two years, to ensure data is not lost or difficult to access in the coming decades. This will include dealing with huge investments in new data-infrastructure and applications, reviewing old inflexible processes and attend to the lack of available digital skills and experience.

Do these topics sound familiar to you and are you currently considering a transformation project from COBOL, Assembler, CA IDMS, BS2000, z/OS or Adabas-Natural? Perhaps you need some help, sorting out some of the bigger issues involved in such a project, such as how to organize the testing, or how to keep the application evolving with new functionality during the project.

At Astadia, we have assisted several federal and state agencies in transforming legacy systems into modern, flexible platforms and moving to the cloud.

Get in touch to learn about the automated migration and testing tools we use in successful transformation projects.