The biggest challenge for the IBM i market today is keeping up with the rapidly advancing technology in a meaningful way. The rate at which technology is improving processes and operating procedures is staggering. Trying to navigate the maze of what is a fad and what will stand the test of time can be overwhelming.
Change is hard. Because the AS400 market is considered legacy, change is something that seems to happen at a much slower rate than on other platforms. The advantage to using the AS400 is its stability, which can at times be in direct conflict with constantly adapting to new technology. There comes a point, though, where the technological advancement and added functionality outweigh the benefit of the stability. We have reached that point in the AS400 space.
Tackling the Challenge
There is a dire need to adapt new technology that will enable automation and added features, or there will be grave consequences to the IBM market. The goal is to improve your IBM i processing environment without changing the core. No one is going to change their core processes, which have been in place in most IBM i businesses for a long time. They are what administrators know and work with every day, and there is a lot of resistance when you try to change them because the process is time consuming and a struggle. However, you can change ancillary processes and get impressive results in terms of your productivity, system efficiency, and improved engagement. The key to making adjustments—be it through technology or processes—is to make it manageable for the people who are working with the systems every day.
The Best Approach
The best approach for a business looking to make technological advancements would be to do an internal audit of processes and equipment. If a new piece of equipment can complete a task faster, more efficiently, or more securely, you should look into it and assess the cost and the benefit. If a process can be automated through technology, it should also be considered. By automating and updating your process and technology, you increase the bandwidth of your IT employees. This allows them to take on tasks that will help advance your business instead of them working to maintain a “broken” system. It makes more sense to ask your IT staff for improvements that would make their jobs easier or more efficient.
For example, many businesses continue to use physical tape. With the technological advances in storage, there are easily 10 other storage options that would allow a business to update their storage system without disturbing the core process around their IBM i global disk. As well, many people are also not utilizing auxiliary storage pools. You can add additional disk that is not built into the global disk, the perfect example of utilizing technology to improve your ancillary process while leaving the core process the same. There is virtually no difference in the processing power, but your all-important core processes have not been altered. These are just two examples of ancillary improvement processes that can make big impacts on the efficiency of your systems.
Other places for quick improvement could be upgrading to high-speed communication and making sure your switches are upgraded. At DSI, all of our equipment is loaded with 16Gb switches, but most businesses’ systems can only handle 4 or 8 Gb, so they never see the full capacity of our system.
Organizational Benefits
Don’t let yourself fall too far behind. It is harder to update from defunct technology. For instance, if someone has been successfully using an LTO2 tape for years and now wants to upgrade to LTO6, they will need to go through the extra (and extremely time-consuming) step of finding something to migrate the data from LTO2 to LTO6 in order for it to be readable. If they had stayed current with the technology of LTO3, LTO4, LTO5, they would not have this issue. It is much more work to update an obsolete system.
Similarly, the benefits of regularly updating your ancillary processes in order to better utilize updated technology are easy to assess. Simply put, efficiency and engagement are increased. One of the defining characteristics of the IBM i systems is that they are reliable. However, humans thrive on learning new skills and tasks, especially when they make their jobs more efficient and meaningful. Making systemic updates a priority in 2016 is a mission that will continue to serve businesses for years to come as they adopt it as a practice.