Beyond reactive IT: Building proactive operational intelligence for the mainframe

The article argues that mainframe modernization is shifting from reactive monitoring to proactive operational intelligence, using AI to correlate alerts, logs, dependencies, and historical incident patterns so teams can diagnose issues faster and prevent outages. For CIOs, the business value is reduced downtime, fewer missed batch windows, and less reliance on scarce mainframe experts, while strategically it reframes modernization as improving how critical systems are operated—not just upgrading applications or infrastructure. For IT organizations, this means embedding contextual intelligence directly into workflows so operators can move from “what broke?” to “what should we do next?” with greater speed and consistency.