Improve Workload Resilience With z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator and z/OS Workload Interaction Navigator
March 24, 2020
IBM has two new contributions to the IBM Z family: A data infrastructure provided by z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator and a visualization engine driven by z/OS Workload Interaction Navigator.
ArticlesHow Crypto Revolutions in the Financial Industry Link to Modern-Day Conceptions of Fintech
March 16, 2020
The financial sector experienced turmoil in the past decade. We don’t have to hand cash or credit cards to our taxi drivers anymore as we can use an app instead. Furthermore, we can easily send money to our friends and family via Payoneer and Paypal, never leaving the comfort of our homes. What’s more, today […]
ArticlesLower Levels of IT Managers Should Have IT Experience
January 20, 2020
In my roles as IBM senior systems engineer, and later, IT consultant and project manager, I’ve worked with a wide variety of IT managers, especially first and second level managers. That’s where most of the work is done, where pieces are connected and enabled, yet I found in many projects or development efforts—especially situations involving […]
ArticlesMinimizing Project Plan Delays With Debugging
December 16, 2019
Project planning has been a way of life for me since my career’s early days, learned from an IBM senior systems engineer who was my comrade providing support to a large, leading edge insurance company, driven by their appetite for CICS First Customer Shipment, then Early Support Programs as IBM’s early introduction programs evolved. Project […]
ArticlesThe Benefits of Working Remotely in IT
November 15, 2019
When I was rewriting a student records system for my graduate college, I spent most of time in a tiny room with a keypunch and desk filled with old and new program printouts, plus the punched card versions of each. When I wrote code, it was an instruction per card (or more if putting an […]
Capacity Planning and Management: Don’t Let the Tank Go Dry
October 8, 2019
IT computing complexes are fluctuating, growing, evolving entities, characterized by continual, erratic growth, intertwined with shifting business volumes. The long-term trend is continual system growth driven by business volumes, as well as new forms of usage. A daunting challenge for most IT operations is to have a “crystal ball” that predicts IT resource demand growth, […]
ArticlesManaging the IT Project Backlog
September 11, 2019
While IT seems to be an exercise in reading the future and transforming it into business processes, IT often misuses its most vital resource—the people that turn hardware, software and networks into business applications that improve productivity, provide new function, and increase employee effectiveness. Analysts are pulled off projects barely halfway complete, designers are reassigned […]
ArticlesGet Started With Go Language on AIX
September 3, 2019
Go toolchain, the self-hosted toolchain of the new high-performance networking and multiprocessing language, is now available on AIX* 7.2 for POWER8*. This toolchain aims to complement the previous port of Go for AIX, which was made within gcc (known as the gccgo toolchain). What Is Go Language? Go is a new imperative language inspired by […]
ArticlesManagement by Intimidation Is a Formula for Failure
July 16, 2019
Over the decades I’ve seen scores of management staff in action, some competent and motivating, others technology savvy yet people ignorant, some just the opposite, some political and back-stabbing, and some truly cost-obsessed. I spent 17 years with IBM and flourished under their management style, then founded an IT consulting firm. Instead of being managed […]
ArticlesSLAs Simplify Support
June 17, 2019
Service-level agreements (SLAs) were nearly nonexistent when I started in IT. Those of us involved in online systems implementation were too focused on keeping terminal-based applications operational and tolerably responsive to worry about such things; furthermore, no one had heard of them. There wasn’t much pressure for an SLA either, because end users were infatuated […]