Operational Backbone Work: Modernization Activities in the Migration of Monolith-Oriented IT Architectures

Abstract

To cope with new digital markets, incumbent financial organizations need to modernize their monolithic system portfolio to a more flexible and efficient form. This has proven to be quite challenging since the existing systems are tightly integrated with historical practices. We frame the portfolio as the operational backbone (OB) and ask what are the key activities of OB work in monolithic systems migration, and what is the outcome of such a migration process? We chose a case study approach to grasp a complex issue within a real-life context: a big financial institution embarking on a digital journey to modernize its core systems. Our contribution is a migration model that describes three key modernization activities attributed to OB Work, and the role of these activities in modernizing the IT portfolio from a fragmented to a more coherent and flexible OB