Latest Articles
Complexities for the Mainframe CIO in Today’s IT Landscape
The Modern Challenge to Run, Grow and Transform Business As the role relates to business, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is a fairly modern position—adding to the growing stable of C-level executive job titles—that has been created through necessity as IT...
Part I: The four hallmarks of an effective CIO
Self-driving cars; thermostats that learn your habits; expert systems that help diagnose and treat cancer; smartphones replacing credit cards…and on and on! Technology is becoming more and more important to organizations, no matter what they make or do. Which means an...
The Evolving Mainframe Landscape
Most of us acknowledge the fact that the mainframe will be around for a very long time. There are too many companies whose core business relies on the power and resiliency that the mainframe provides for their mission critical applications. It just makes sense to...
The DB2 Performance Advisor – What is Performance
Assuring optimal application and system performance is one of the most important goals of IT professionals. And for DB2 developers and DBAs, tuning and monitoring are often daily tasks. But there are many factors involved in DB2 optimization and performance monitoring...
ReBoot Hill Revisited
Once upon a time, a website existed that recorded some of the most spectacularly failed mainframe migration projects. Of interest to all mainframe type people, I’m sure that it saw a lot of traffic; a Google search on ReBoot Hill yields the website, but it no longer...
Big Data and Gardening
You can be a botanist, a horticulturist or a gardener—it depends on how knowledgeable you want to be about what you are growing. But what’s that got to do with Big Data? Well, I was recently having a conversation with Matt Ritter from Athena Health about Big Data,...
Automated SQL Quality Assurance
To leverage available skill sets and to save on costs, many large IT organizations have been moving their DB2 development efforts to off-platform programmers. These programmers are not mainframe developers, and may not even have mainframe logon accounts. They write...
Starting Small with Big Data
I recently read an excellent IBM paper on best practices for achieving line-of-business (LOB) performance increases through enterprise data analytics. This is an impressive and convincing piece on how top-down planning at the enterprise level can enable positive...
Big Data and the Mainframe: A Perfect Partnership
"Big data" and the impact of analytics on large quantities of data is a persistent trend these days in just about every organization. The general idea is that large amounts of data, from multiple sources, and of multiple types, can be analyzed to produce heretofore...
My Great Uncle Was a Farmer so I am a Mainframer
Why am I a Mainframer? It all started when my great uncle bought a Combine…. When I was growing up, my family and I made frequent trips to a farm on Manitoulin Island in Canada—about 250 miles north of Detroit—a remote place where farming was difficult and few made it...
