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Now departing: Union Pacific's 40-year-old mainframe

Now departing: Union Pacific's 40-year-old mainframe

After decades of service from a mainframe that kept on chugging, Union Pacific IT leaders knew they had to retire their workhorse. But how do you get rid of a massive, core technology system, without disrupting business operation, breaking the bank, or biting off too much change at once? Here's advice from a CIO who's in the midst of doing it right.

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Discussions about Union Pacific's eventual move off its mainframe started some seven or eight years ago. The project kicked off in earnest four years ago. Tennison says UP couldn't find what it was looking for from packaged software vendors, so his team decided to build their future system themselves. (For more on today's mainframe issues, see "5 Things CIOs Need to Know About Mainframe Modernization.")

First up, Tennison's team had to create, the nearly decade-long technology roadmap. The vision was to deliver a distributed, automated network and applications platform that could scale with the company, and could also control UP's 8,400 locomotives traveling across 32,000 miles of track. The system would need to manage customer orders, schedule trains, track shipments and many other transactional processes. And it would also have to integrate with the company's SAP ERP system.

Underpinning this new system, called NetControl, would be a service-oriented, event-driven architecture that relies chiefly on open-source technology. Several tenets guided Tennison and his team during initial prototyping. For instance, he says they looked to computer science and engineering graduates and the types of environments they were using-"the Linux, Java, Unix worlds," he says-and matched many of those C.S. trends to their development strategies.

A nod to the past, however, influenced two other areas. Because monolithic mainframes had always offered forced standardization-in development and database tools, in middleware components, in security-Tennison and his team wanted to keep as much standardization and discipline as possible in NetControl. "Making sure everybody does stuff the same way to a large degree," he says, "drives productivity and ease of use, minimizes security risk, and maximizes your purchasing power."

They were also thinking long-long-term again. "We wanted to make sure anything we put in place could have the potential for another 40 years of life, just as our original one had," Tennison says. "So we had to guarantee that we had almost unlimited scaling capacity, and moving to a network of horizontally designed servers gave us that."

A successful prototype delivered several years ago confirmed IT's technological vision and architectural framework for Union Pacific's new system. "Now," Tennison recalls, "we had to go after business issues."

The Big Sell

To pull this transition off, Tennison knew he had to get UP-wide buy-in: from the chairman and board to all the key VPs, operations and supply chain managers, marketing and finance execs, and everybody else who would touch the system. Some business areas would be especially affected; others, not so much. But it would, for sure, touch everybody in some way. Tennison needed to make the "sale" of his career and convince others that this was less a "tactical" project and more a "strategic" one.

"It was very easy for a departmental head to stand up and say: 'I need this system for my department,'" Tennison says. "It was hard to get any single department head to say: 'I need to change up an entire core infrastructure component of our business that's going to touch everybody else,' because they had a lot of other things they were fighting every day."

And because the project cut across so many departments, lining up funding for the project-expected to cost $200 million by the end-was challenging. "This is one of those things where the direct benefits cut across the whole organization," Tennison says, "and sometimes the benefits are much about interrelationships between the organizations as they are around direct results in one organization."

Once funding was approved, the NetControl project group placed key UP employees on the teams (from both high and low levels and from many different UP organizations) to become if not leaders of the teams, key members. Though the project duration is disarmingly long, Tennison and his project managers have "decomposed it into small chunks," he says. "Architecturally, this all has to fit together. But with each of these chunks, you have to eat the elephant a little bit at the time."

So far, Union Pacific has spent $70 million and is 35 percent complete with the project. Tennison seems pleased with the progress. One of the many early benefits has come in UP's bill-of-lading processes (when a customer tenders a shipment and gives instructions on where to pick up and drop off the commodity). The critical data contained in these bills determines the movement and configurations of trains and drives the billing process; UP receives hundreds of thousands of in-bound bills each month, according to the company. The system in place can "recognize and correct many common problems, allowing for greater automation of shipment handling," according to UP.

Tennison has also delivered some critical project and functionality wins, which is important from a self-preservation standpoint. "I do worry about these long, long duration projects because the reality of world is that you do tend to get measured on quarterly and annual results, and you have to be able to stand up and say: This is what I did for you last quarter," Tennison says. "You have to have some wins along the way."

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