A new report has found that nearly three quarters of modernization initiatives fail. The 2020 Mainframe Modernization Barometer report from Advanced suggests that a big obstacle to such projects is a disconnect between priorities of technical and leadership teams. 

According to Advanced, the primary motivation to pursue a modernization effort varies depending on who you talk to: a business or technical team. Their chances of securing funding also varies.

CIOs and IT leaders are more interested in the technology landscape of the company overall, while enterprise architects are more internally focused. Sixty-nine percent of enterprise architects cite hardware dependency and technical influences as their primary reason for wanting to modernize. Sixty-five percent of CIOs and IT leaders cite business competitiveness as their primary reason.

RELATED CONTENT: Think through your path to modernization and the cloud

There is also a large funding gap between these groups. Only 12% of application and infrastructure managers receive full funding, while 53% of CIOs and 42% of CFOs get full funding. Fifty-six percent of application and infrastructure managers believe this inability to secure funding is driven by a fear of change from leadership. 

Advanced believes technical teams might be more successful in receiving funding if they can state their case using terms that non-technical business teams can understand. 

“Collaboration is absolutely essential to successful modernization,” said Brandon Edenfield, managing director of application modernization at Advanced. “To achieve this, technical teams must ensure that senior leadership see the value and broader business impact of these efforts in terms they can understand. Without full commitment and buy-in from the C-Suite, these projects run the risk of complete failure.”

The research revealed that while there is a gap in motivation and funding between those two teams, both are on the same page when it comes to seeing the value of the cloud in modernization initiatives. Ninety-eight percent of respondents reported that there were active plans to move legacy applications to the cloud in 2020. According to Advanced, this push is driven by benefits such as enhanced agility and flexibility, and the ability to attract technologists who expect to be able to work with advanced technologies.