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Biggest challenge:

Not to pick on any one response - but it's related to many:

Business needs skilled developers for low money. No training offered, and as one said..."work, work, work".
Oh - and the company may not have invested in modern development tools and modern methods of development.
In any language or system, the outcome will be poor. And from that, they will cry that they cannot find
the developers they need - and perhaps dump a perfectly good system that (to me..) has been poorly served
by management.

Challenges (I know request was "Biggest" but I see them as all related):
a. development tools that consistently work well (while the midrange lists are a wealth of info, some of the traffic also seems to indicate a wealth of problems with certain developer tools - your scaring my managers (not me) from wanting to go there...).

b. online education for the operations side of the business - available when we want it, not when next class is... next qtr, next year... And yes - same education for programmers, for DB2 analysts, etc - I know it's out there somewhere, but needs to be easier to find. Yes, I love Common & other conferences, but we have a new operator last week - she needs basic training today! and that is available on other platforms (I hope Common is looking at this area?)

c. I think IBM and vendors pulled in many new customers and upgraded the older legacy customers with Roadshows - why not a virtual set of adshows? - my current employer came to me to discuss the word "AS400" - they were losing potential sales because prospects saw us as "old" because our sales team talks about the "AS400" - they wanted a 1 to 2 page summary of what is it now, and "why" - it took afew hours, pulling from some white papers & the IBM website - but I gave them a checklist of Why IBM i for Power Systems (and pardon me for comparing the word "AS400" with the musical term "disco" - to non "i" people the comparison works-it's not been an AS400 for a very long time).

d. There are some very good studio tools (IBM and others) for building apps - we (and management) should be more open to this. If you want modern interfaces, rapid development, testing & deployment - the machine & OS supports all this. Don't let them replace the machine because you are more comfortable tinkering with display files. We've had some of these modern tools for decades. I've worked in several tools previously on many successful projects.

e. We need to each of us look to see what we can do for our systems that adds to the point it's worth keeping. There is a wealth of new stuff many of us have never tried.

All of the above we still face in our shop - we need better tooling (I'm stuck with pdm) - more advanced & quickly available education (and please, quality education, not just a sales pitch & HelloWorld ... - more visibility to our managers of what the system can do (some of us are way down the food chain) and management responds to video (short attention span) - Why i for Power Systems - and finally some initiative to put forth modern solutions.

my 2 cents
Jim Franz

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