John's points are on point. :)
Besides, Mike explained the situation as being one in which the management is thinking it's an outdated system.
Of course, that may be a cover excuse, as in he might be fresh out of accounting college where it's Quickbooks all the way, man, or a "mainframe" school. And almost all the open source user groups attendees don't have a clue about the system, they think RPG is still columnar and indicators and all that because they've been doing other things. --> Except for the local PHP meeting organizer, who works with Zend, and a couple of Red Hat guys that work with Power systems and they've seen the machines at work.
LESSON FOR US IBM I DEVELOPERS!
Let's get going on getting up to speed on serving up GUI to the users, on Java, PHP, Python on I, and the rest. And do a little here and there. Last place I was at one of the more go-to guys was serving up web pages from programs straight out of the dev machine, just a "sandbox" thing.
Then you can start showing stuff around....
The open source techs have lots of get-togethers this area (and some in Nashville where I was too). Anybody want to meet up in South Florida, email me separately, I'll be doing something soon I think.
Alan
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 5:19 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Where can I find a list of current IBM i companies?
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Stone, Joel <Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No matter how good or bad the iseries may be, the city gov would
probably be best served with a platform that is running many other
city government organizations.
I believe many other cities still do use the i.
With iseries, you are re-inventing the wheel for each of these [other
systems that must be integrated] and it is enormously expensive. With
a platform that is used by thousands of other cities, it is simply a
matter of following a setup procedure from the
vendor/county/state/fed.
I agree with the premise that reinventing the wheel is expensive, but you haven't provided any evidence that sticking with the i necessarily entails reinventing the wheel for things. You also haven't provided evidence that going to some other platform doesn't *also* entail reinventing the wheel for things.
They are and should be concerned with what other CITIES are running,
which is why they want to drop iseries (as stated by you, other cities
apparently have moved off iseries as heard at city leadership
conferences).
I think it does make sense for a city to be more concerned with other cities than with businesses. Mike never said they (the IT group he works for) know for sure what the upper management knows or has heard; it was just a working theory. I would not be surprised if plenty of cities do think of the i as outdated, and some have surely migrated away from it. I also would not be surprised if (as Mike was
wondering) some cities' upper management *think* they have migrated, but haven't really. (For example, if a city now has a browser interface to some important functions that they used to do on green screens, it could well be that they still have their i.)
So if you want to keep working for the city and NOT be grouped with
the legacy platform, then EMBRACE the search for the new system and be
a cheerleader for it.
Well, this comment has value to the extent that it attempts to counter "unjustified" loyalty or attachment to existing systems. I would be equally wary of jumping to the newest, shiniest thing.
The thing to embrace is a sincere examination of the situation. That is, be open. Be rational. Be objective. There are definitely advantages to platforms other than the i. There are advantages to the i. There are advantages to staying with what you have (be it i or something else). Are the advantages of a new system big enough to justify the cost of changing to it? In most cases, it's impossible to have perfect knowledge of all these things, but at least you can strive to avoid being closed-minded.
John
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