Re: iSeries Support Question

   One element is complexity of different types of know how required of the
   staff, and if they have any added hassle porting applications across
   platforms.  For example, you make a modification on one machine & happy
   company asks for same features on another machine ... but that other
   machine is a different OS, lower version programming languages, so you
   have to figure out how to get the job done without the sophisticated
   techniques used on first implementation.

   How much of your code is written in a programming style that is not used
   in modern day development, such as the RPG cycle, or before structured
   programming became a standard?

   How many operating systems are there, how many computer languages, how
   many different packages and applications, how many communication
   protocols, and how often does what stuff go down.  If you have Windoze
   products, how many different versions of them are in current use in same
   enterprise?  Various kinds of compliance (government and standards groups)
   overhead?  There is an upper limit to what you can expect one person to
   not only know, but be good at.  Some of this you can fob off on tech
   support, and programming standards.  A lot of the workload can be
   semi-automated to take care of grunt work, but someone has to know what is
   going on, interpret clues.

   If you have XX servers, and they all doing exact same kind of work, and
   they all networked, then 1 person can handle them.

   If you have XX users, and they all need constant hand-holding, or their
   equipment needs constant support, then the IT staff is dictated by the
   volume and rate of user troubles.  Are end users running same kinds of
   applications able to talk each other through challenges, or are they using
   different keyboard mapping and other interfaces such that different
   keystroke combinations needed to do the same stuff?

   Does your sysadmin get reports off printers and deliver to users, or can
   they get their own reports?

   We have users who not only rarely read the documentation, and cannot be
   persuaded to rely on the HELP key, they throw the manuals in the garbage
   when they personally no longer need them.  When managers have not been to
   ERP or other education, they not know what their people are missing.

   Family owned business is more likely to
   (a) be undercapitalized when it comes to paying for tools to automate
   human labor, and streamline inter-OS, such as getting data from AS/400 to
   Excel, or running unattended backups, archiving (I want to put end fiscal
   reports on CD or DVD or something that will be around 10 years from now)
   (b) distribute workload to humans irrespective of their skills &
   experience ... so when I sign e-mails "computer janitor" it is really true
   that I spend a lot of time cleaning up data base messes that in another
   company might be considered to be the responsibility of the users who
   created the messes, or re-write the software so that it is less
   mess-friendly

   If you have partitions or libraries running same software in different
   human languages, you may need people fluent in application support and
   tech support in both the language and culture of those users.

   We have cascade effects. 
   * A twinax connection loses its address (this can also happen with PCs)
   and hijacks someone else's.  That device has no trouble making
   connections, it is the hijacked workstation that sends SOS for support.
   * Power goes out one place, then a bunch of connections try to reconnect,
   but something at end of line has failed, like a printer that was in middle
   of printing when the connection went down.  So the error message that
   people are seeing is kind of irrelevant to what is really going on.
   * Managers think we can buy cheapest PC printers, and have them do
   anything.  Users think printers are interchangeable, but not know what you
   have to do to configure them for combination of application and printer
   capabilities, so "if it ain't broke don't fix it" does not apply to us.

     Hello all,
     does anyone know of any benchmarking or best practice regarding number
     of
     system admin. staff required per system?
     Eg. is the ratio 5 systems/sysadmin, or 9 systems per sysadmin, etc.

     thanks
     Ashok

   -
   Al Macintyre
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlMac
   http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
   BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
   http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html