Mainframes are fast, powerful, production-proven and, to many of the world’s largest companies, indispensable.

When businesses were threatened by the Year 2000 bug, mainframe awareness was elevated at all organizational levels due to the potential impact of this system failing. Significant investments in planning, software redesign, testing and deployment resulted, helping companies successfully mitigate the risk while continuing to leverage mainframes for business applications and data.

Today, companies face another threat, not from the technology, but from who will support it. Mainframe-savvy application and systems programmers are fast reaching retirement age. In fact, a recent META Group study found that 55 percent of IT workers with mainframe experience are over 50 years old.

This is not a technology problem; it is a people problem.

While technology advances improve the mainframe’s capabilities, people continue to play a significant role in the solution and, most important, the business outcomes. This is the challenge of continuity: Who’s going to support your mainframe, and who will be your keepers of the mainframe culture that have helped it become a stable, reliable, and strong performer? It is critical for IT executives to begin planning immediately for solutions to the continuity challenge.

The Declining Mainframe Workforce

The stability of mainframe applications—and the businesses that depend on them—will soon be in jeopardy due to a disappearing technical support workforce and the potential evaporation of the mainframe culture. As many of today’s mainframe technical personnel will retire, it will be increasingly difficult for IT managers to support their mainframe applications without incurring significantly higher costs or turning to unproven technical staff lacking the necessary understanding, experience, and technical culture.

Retiring mainframe support staff may take with them the culture, highly developed abilities and persistent sense of responsibility essential to ongoing mainframe operations and, by extension, the businesses that rely on un-interrupted mainframe availability. Consequently, organizations face the following distinct losses:

- The experience and judgment necessary to keep operating systems and infrastructure software maintained without costly disruptions to operations

- The culture of technical responsibility (plus the awareness of business and technical context) that keeps the selection of software and the performance of the mainframe aligned with business needs

- In-depth familiarity with local hard ware and software configurations and applications, allowing for proper support and rapid problem resolution while avoiding unscheduled service disruptions

- Knowledge of the numerous things not to do in a complex operating environment

- Historical awareness of the causes and reasons for current circumstances and their relevance

- Proven persistence in properly and thoroughly undertaking regular operational responsibilities essential to business continuity, such as security administration, storage management, and disaster preparedness

- The skills and background necessary to enable new distributed applications and interfaces (such as online customer self-service systems) to connect with mainframe data and applications.

These are all human issues, and the departure of key personnel and their abilities is clearly a threat to the reliability, data integrity, and systems management that are the cornerstones of the mainframe.

If organizations don’t begin to formulate solutions now, the potential problems created by mainframe discontinuity can become increasingly severe. Mainframe performance and reliability could drop precariously, while the costs for bringing in mainframe systems programmers and other support personnel could rise exponentially.

Other Options Exist

To retain control of their mainframe strategy and avoid being forced into a less-than-optimal direction at the last minute, IT managers must choose from four alternatives, or a combination of them:

- Migrating to non-mainframe platforms

- Outsourcing mainframe activities

- Maintaining existing mainframe resources via expert consultants

- Maintaining existing mainframe resources via an in-house continuity strategy.

Consider these points in determining which option is best for your business:

- The complexity and business value of your current mix of mainframe and distributed hardware, applications, and management software

- How much time is available to deal with this issue before it would otherwise become a crisis

- Your organization’s own internal demographics and the skills that are subject to imminent departure

- How and whether headcount can be proactively increased to develop the next generation of mainframe application, and systems programmers while cultivating cultural continuity

- The real costs and other factors inherent in the various continuity options, both short-and long-term, including data integrity, cross-application integration, performance requirements, and transition costs

- How all this maps to your corporate and IT strategy.

With these factors in mind, let’s examine each alternative individually.

Move to an Alternative Platform

Moving to non-mainframe platforms is a major undertaking that involves moving applications or data to Unix, Linux, or Windows-based distributed systems and architectures. This requires developers to reverse engineer applications so organizations can migrate existing COBOL applications to distributed architectures. Alternatively, readily available user data conversion tools can be used to move mainframe data into new, packaged application systems. An advantage of this approach is that it fundamentally removes or reduces the need for future mainframe support.

The downside to this approach includes the time and cost investments that organizations must make. It also carries the risk that the complexity of the architecture is increased rather than decreased. Additionally, the target systems might suffer from diminished system management, security, capacity and reliability levels, which are the characteristics that led customers to use mainframes in the first place.

Finally, the biggest risk to this approach is the people challenge. Using this approach without the appropriate personnel and tools is dangerous. If inexperienced personnel manage a migration project of this magnitude, how can an organization be sure they are properly relocating mainframe applications and having them function at specified performance levels?

Ideally, migrating to non-mainframe platforms should result in equally good, if not better, functionality and performance in the distributed world as that which existed on the mainframe. Failing to achieve this “zero sum equivalent” can be quite costly, including the training and personnel efforts required.

Outsourcing Mainframe Support

Outsourcing is another alternative for organizations that want to reduce their involvement with mainframes but still want to retain the mainframe’s strengths of system management, security, and reliability.

Typically, companies outsource their non-core or non-critical functions. However, this poses a dilemma, since most mainframe applications are considered critical and are closely allied with the organization’s core competencies.

In any case, outsourcing must be approached with care. Outsourcing vendors must be chosen with caution and important questions must be answered, including:

- What impact will this have on your long-term service levels?

- What are the implications for your organization’s customer and public reputation and trust? For example, how will your key clients respond in the event of a technical or business failure at your outsourcer?

- What impact will it have on your ability to adapt? For example, how readily can a merger or divestiture be accommodated?

- Will there be sufficient expertise to help ensure continuity of culture and awareness of your technical and business context?

- Will the outsourced data be stored in a secure location?

- Does the vendor employ tight security controls and policies?

- What measures will the vendor take to provide services profitably at a price you are willing to pay?

- How will the vendor deal with the mainframe generation gap issue internally?

These considerations are essential, even in non-critical application handovers. For mission-critical data and applications, they’re imperative.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that there are no panaceas and outsourcing is no exception. Only time and attention from properly trained staff can perpetuate awareness of your company’s IT and business context. To simply hand over your systems and applications to uninitiated technologists with insufficient transition time and no involvement of the personnel currently responsible for them won’t solve any problems; it will just transfer them to an organization that will have to learn from scratch what your current applications and systems programmers already know.

Use Expert Mainframe Consultants for Expert Mainframe Support

If you want something done right, why not hire an expert? Hire the most talented technologists available to manage your mainframe environment, either by contracting with independent consultants, bringing experts in-house, or both. Since mainframe resources are retained, this solution avoids the risks of software-and system-level migration or transfer discussed in the first two alternatives.

This alternative’s challenge lies in the fact that the talent pool is shrinking and costs are rising. Consultants also must become familiar with the local IT environment, especially if they are undertaking tasks with a high degree of customized content, such as application maintenance. An expert mainframe technologist has generally built his or her expertise over more than a decade. Should you contract with such experts, the local systems and process knowledge they build will leave with them when their contract ends.

An additional risk is that unqualified consultants might begin to come out of the woodwork if the demand for this expertise drives the price high enough. IT managers must choose their consultants carefully and should consider working only with trusted partners and employing comprehensive reference and screening checks.

Keep Mainframe Support In-House

By keeping mainframe support in-house, organizations maintain ownership and security of their computing assets and strategic mainframe applications and data.

Developing an in-house mainframe continuity strategy acknowledges the continuing importance of the mainframe and avoids the risks associated with migration, outsourcing, and consultants. Nevertheless, this alternative presents its own challenges. First, it requires executive commitment to a strategic approach that enables the future success and relevance of a mainframe environment. Just as important, however, is establishing cultural continuity.

Such a strategy begins with proactive hiring and the necessary lead time for the education and apprenticeship-style cultivation of the next generation of technical staff. Strategies to consider include:

- Training mainframe basics through onsite education/mentoring and Computer-Based Training (CBT)

- Off-site, Web-based, and CBT education courses on specific products to be used in the performance of duties (for example, management software)

- Staff augmentation services to cover for your experienced mainframe technologists so they can dedicate time to mentoring the next generation

- Support and enhancement of your local mainframe culture. This is a significant part of formation and retention. A sense of belonging and relevance is an important defense against attrition during times of high demand.

- User conference attendance to fill in and expand awareness, ability and cultural relevance in the whole mainframe context

- Current, highly functional, integrated, easy-to-use and maintain management software that enables the next generation to focus on what matters.

This last point is of particular note because software that’s obsolete, obscure or simply not designed to respond to business realities can easily become a permanent obstacle.

Management Software: Essential for Mainframe Survival

Without the appropriate mainframe management software, a new generation of well-trained, enthusiastic mainframe technologists will still be stymied if faced with a legacy of outdated and poorly configured software.

A good place to begin is with health check services to recommend how your current mainframe management software may be upgraded and better configured to meet today’s business needs, followed by upgrade services to implement the ensuing recommendations. However, to take full advantage of the opportunity to move your mainframe environment to the next generation, it makes sense to complete the task by using mainframe management software that’s easy to install, maintain, and use.

By ensuring that the mainframe is supported with the best software tools that align with business needs, the new generation of technologists will be freed to focus on results, rather than constantly untangling historical how-to’s.

After all, the evolution of the mainframe includes an evolution of IT infrastructure management solutions, too. Yes, there may always be a place for traditional features such as JCL, SMP/E, and Assembler. But today’s tools no longer have to mandate such expertise before a new technologist can start to become effective with them.

Sophisticated mainframe management tools now offer such features as PC-based installation and maintenance wizards and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). This will make the transition smoother for the next generation of mainframe personnel, increasing their confidence and enabling their productivity faster.

Choosing the proper software goes hand-in-hand with the hiring, training, and mentoring of new mainframe technical personnel.

Of course, the mainframe is no longer an island, so it’s also important that the environment where your next generation of mainframe technologists develops takes that into account. Having an enterprise architecture that includes mainframe and distributed computing positions your organization for the future and brings breadth and relevance to technical staff coming from a non-mainframe background. By seeing and working with leading-edge technologies that bring the enterprise together, the next generation can take its skills to the next level rather than feeling limited to a single platform.

Conclusion