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
midrange.com
