Joseph Gulla
Contributor
Joseph Gulla is the general manager and IT leader of Alazar Press, a publisher of award winning children’s books. Joe is a frequent contributor to IBM Destination z (the community where all things mainframe converge) and writes weekly for the IT Trendz blog where he explores a wide range of topics that interconnect with IBM Z.
A Comprehensive Approach to Application Management
December 4, 2017
In this post, I explore the discipline of application management, which is an IT management process with tools focused on the availability, performance and manageability of applications. Applications that have files, databases and other resources distributed over multiple OS images can be a challenge to manage. When suddenly some part of the application isn’t working, […]
ArticlesAge of Networks and Network Management
November 27, 2017
In this post, I explore the current state of network management, a powerfully mature discipline that emerged after going through many changes as networking evolved to its present state. Network management is still growing and evolving. That’s because network environments are still developing in sophistication, built-in support and changing device implementations like virtualized firewalls, switches […]
ArticlesComprehensive Systems Management
November 20, 2017
In this post, I explore systems management as a comprehensive discipline: What is it, how has it changed and what are the latest innovations to emerge. Systems management has developed into a mature and vibrant network of activities that are key to keeping systems available and useful. Let’s consider it as a model with categories […]
ArticlesIT Management Activities and Their Context
November 13, 2017
This is the first in a series about IT management. You might think of this as system, network, application and cloud management, but definitions and practices are changing and expanding. Or, you might think of this as IT Service management. That’s certainly part of it as well. IT service management creates context so it is […]
ArticlesDesign and Develop Large-Scale System Software
November 6, 2017
This is the sixth and final post in a series about things they never taught me in school. Over the years, I have taken many different computer classes in schools, through IT companies and by self-study, but nothing prepared me for the rigor of leading a team in the design and development of a large-scale […]
ArticlesHow to Create an IT Offering
October 23, 2017
This is the fourth post in a series about things they never taught me in school. Attending classes, I never learned how to create an IT offering. In fact, I never heard of an IT offering until I was 20 years into my IT career. At that time, elements like professional or support services were […]
ArticlesHow to Automate an Entire Software System
October 16, 2017
I studied to be a computer application developer. My interests were halfway between business and computers, so developing applications were a pretty good fit. Besides, I didn’t know anything about the system side of things—OSes, middleware software, job entry subsystems and system software installation—basically the tasks and concerns of the system programmers. After five years […]
ArticlesOther Things They Didn’t Teach Me in School: Pseudo-Conversational Programming
October 9, 2017
I spent three months studying COBOL, wrote eight challenging batch programs, and then took my first assignment, which involved writing online transactions that I learned nothing about before taking the assignment. Since I had no training in real-time programming (i.e., online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, I needed some tutoring by the analyst assigned to be […]
ArticlesThings They Didn’t Teach Me in School: Polyglot
October 2, 2017
Over the years, you’ve probably spent a lot of time reading and studying computer topics. I have attended many classes and even taught a few and never came across the topics of polyglot persistence and programming. If somebody taught me about polyglot anything, I am sure that I would have remembered it. These are topics, […]
ArticlesFuture of Testing
September 25, 2017
This is the last post in this series on enterprise testing. The focus has been on both system and application programmers in an enterprise systems setting. The first post described enterprise testing and explained the many challenges that programmers experienced 40 years ago in deploying defect free software. The next two posts discussed system programmers […]