How can you make sure that your mainframe staff stay up-to-date with the latest ideas in the mainframe world? The answer is to make sure they have access to magazines, newsletters, user groups, and social media. There are still printed mainframe-related publications...
Mainframes are under siege. You might like to picture the mainframe department as some medieval castle surrounded by invading troops. There’s no actual fighting going on, but gradually the forces of distributed computing are waiting for the survivors inside the...
For a long time now, the still young at heart mainframers have been making plans. Unfortunately, it’s not plans for how to improve mainframe performance or reduce costs, it’s what to do once they retire. And the bad news is that more and more mainframers are retiring....
We’re all familiar with the ups and downs of daily life working on a mainframe, but does it make you happy? Perhaps the best branch of psychology to use to see whether mainframers are happy at work is positive psychology. Positive psychology uses scientific...
You’ve heard people talking about it and finally your organization has decided that there is a business case for going down that route, but what does big data involve? What do you need to know? After all, mainframes have always been able to store large amounts of...
Imagine what you’d think if the latest IT survey—perhaps even the Arcati Mainframe User Survey—said that the majority of mainframers are able to perform above the average. Would you think that sounded right? Or, would some small piece of a math lesson from long ago...
The way you learned about mainframes was probably a mixture of courses, working with a more experienced colleague, and trial and error. And once you became a bit of an expert, it didn’t end there. You needed to learn more about Liberty profiles, about RESTful states,...
The days of waterfall software development on a mainframe are coming to an end. It’s no longer tolerable for end users to have to wait two years for a new application to be written and delivered to a spec that, by then, is two years out of date. The inflexibility of...
I was working recently with a mixed bag of people from a company, who were trying to predict the future and see how that company needed to change in order to get where they thought they ought to be going. One issue came up fairly quickly, and that was that 2020 isn’t...
Anyone who has been working on mainframes for any length of time knows that things are always changing. Many people can remember when DB2 was new (1983), the client-server period, and the need for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). And, I’m sure, can come up with a...
