Latest Articles
Thanksgiving, Mom and IT Leadership
Next Thursday, we will sit around a table with people whose political opinions we find heartless or naïve, who don’t binge the same shows as we do (or who don’t even have Netflix), and who think Docker is a brand of pants. And we’ll enjoy ourselves—or at least make a...
Stop Blaming the Mainframe for Healthcare IT Shortfalls
At TEDMED, Eric Dishman makes a bold argument: The US healthcare system is like computing circa 1959, tethered to big, unwieldy central systems: hospitals, doctors, nursing homes. As our aging population booms, it is imperative, he says, to create personal, networked,...
Capacity Planners and Big Data
I was at a regional CMG meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, giving a presentation on Big Data to a group of about forty Capacity Planners (big turnout for North Carolina a week after Hurricane Matthew hit). The group was interested in understanding the impact the...
Healthcare IT Organizations face Critical Challenges
Healthcare IT organizations face enormous challenges: Providers such as hospitals, HMOs, and PPOs must deal with spiraling costs, increasingly strict regulatory requirements, rising patient expectations, constrained reimbursements, and more. Payers such as healthcare...
The Majority of Mainframers Are Above Average!
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...
Punk’s not dead and neither is the mainframe
Admittedly, I’m as much a music fan as I’m a technophile—perhaps it’s this combination that makes it easy for me to draw comparisons from the punk music genre to that of the mainframe. After all, punk hasn’t changed—it has simply evolved. From the early days of 1970s...
Don’t get fooled by the Mainframe FUD
I've been seeing FUD (Fear! Uncertainty! Doubt!) articles like this one for years now and while it's pretty easy to see through them, this time I decided that I just have to say something. The gist of the article, as the title suggests, is that legacy systems are old...
Why the Mainframe is more relevant than ever in the “Hybrid” World
If you’ve earned your living in the IT field for any length of time, you know that words and phrases come and go with regularity. “Hybrid” is one of the words de jour. And, it’s a good word. My only quibble is that those of us who have built integration technology...
Six ways to improve IT Efficiency and Profitability for Healthcare Insurance Companies
If you’re a healthcare insurance company, you’ve probably felt the repercussions of the Affordable Care Act. Since its inception, it has created the largest growth in the number of insured people in four decades—greatly affecting the IT burden within the insurance...
3 ways VMware has succeeded – Distributed Computing’s Failure in Masquerading as a Mainframe
With $6 billion in revenue, VMware is heralded as a great success in the enterprise tech sector. However, VMware’s success is a clear indicator of the failure of distributed computing. Here’s why: Reason #1: A $6 billion band-aid The first chapter of the sad story of...
