A Solution: Evolving Process Automation
Mainframe automation is nothing new, but the changing environment signals there are still more obstacles to tackle. Fortunately, technology can help you overcome these obstacles and extend your mainframe. The primary technology that’s useful in this regard is “advisor” technology, offered by vendors of systems and data management solutions.

When advisor technology is built into tools, it can intelligently automate many tasks and processes, optimize performance, increase staff productivity and scalability and reduce errors.

Advisor technology can help your people decide if and when to run jobs, and often can automatically run the jobs for them. Because it eliminates so much mundane work, the technology raises the productivity of mainframe staffers enabling them to focus on more valuable, innovative projects. It also allows people who are not experts to run jobs reliably. As a result, your people can be effective beyond a single platform and to some extent can become more interchangeable—in other words, your humanpower can become more scalable.

Another major contribution of advisor technology is in scheduling. A stock exchange, for example, can’t open in the morning until it completes a large number of time-consuming overnight batch jobs consisting of hundreds of job steps. Software that includes advisor technology can look at all the job steps, identify the critical path, and determine—based on history—how long a job will take. It not only finds the problem, but is able to determine where the impact will be felt by alerting the IT staff if the job stream is running slower than normal and a critical completion deadline will be missed. With scheduling software, the staff knows if all the jobs can be run before the morning session even begins.

The software also can look at the batch window and determine, based on dependencies and interdependencies, the best order for executing jobs: how many can be run in parallel, which ones have to be serialized and so on. Manually, this analysis would be a nightmare.

Of course, your deep experts may never be interchangeable. For example, you may always need a deep expert on hand who can repair a failed IMS database or fix a storage problem. But the general staff can triage problems and call in experts when needed—conserving the experts’ time.

Automation also can help you add mainframe skills to your staff. Since younger technologists are usually not enamored with the traditional “green screen,” it is becoming difficult to attract graduates to, or cross-train existing staff on, the mainframe.