What’s Standing in Your Way?
Years ago, you had a limited number of mainframe applications. You could map them all—they were discrete, finite and predictable. After testing an application and measuring capacity and performance, you could fine-tune the application to the point where any mainframe system programmer could define all the transactions that could occur within the application.

Today opportunities won’t wait for IT to develop applications in the classical way. You can’t afford to send experts to analyze each subsystem to discover if a problem exists, or find the problem through the elimination of all other possibilities. These new dynamics require a holistic approach to IT. You must focus on a problem in the context of the whole data center and resolve it rapidly.

But several challenges are facing IT departments when it comes to creating that kind of nimble, adaptable organization:

• The continued use of old IT processes and tools.As the industry changes, so should the tools. Using nothing more than traditional methods can cause an IT manager to become frozen in his or her tracks, unable to determine how an outage truly affects the business. You may unwittingly solve less-important problems before more-important ones—and occasionally cause frustration or anger on the business side.
• The attrition of deep mainframe experts. In a typical data center, there are several deep mainframe experts, or experts who have unique subject expertise. No other staff member knows what these experts know, and no one can backfill them. If these experts are ever out of the office recuperating from an illness or accident, it may be literally impossible for anyone to cover for them effectively. When they take other employment or retire, the knowledge loss can disrupt IT and the business.
• The need to accommodate business growth without adding IT staff. The inability to scale and cross-train your staff can impede adaptability. Some people are trained in one silo and can’t be cross-utilized in another. Others don’t currently have the skills to work in the mainframe silo at all. But contrary to popular wisdom, the challenges here are not so much a matter of the skills possessed as the organization’s ability to implement consistent processes across the entire IT environment. Processes are often ill-defined, and many that could and should be automated are performed manually, and inconsistently followed. By creating efficient processes that map back to the business, organizations can overcome some of the challenges associated with limited staff.
• The need for a common IT methodology for managing complex applications. Many applications today pass through multiple processing platforms. IT cannot manage these applications with fragmented methods. Often, for example, transaction performance may become unacceptable and yet every group within IT claims (correctly) that its system is running within the required service level. The result, of course, is time wasted on conference calls—while the business can lose hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per hour.