The Cost of Managing IBM i Without Automation
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Take a fresh look your IBM i investment to identify the areas where automation provides you opportunities for cost control while improving scalability and resource utilization and boosting employee morale.
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The Cost of Managing IBM i Without Automation
- 1. The Cost of Managing IBM i © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. All trademarks and registered trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. With and Without Automation How Automation Influences Everyday Decisions at All Levels
- 2. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 2 Your Hosts Chuck Losinski Director of Automation Technology HelpSystems Broadcasting live from Eden Prairie, Minnesota USA Tom Huntington Executive Vice President of Technical Solutions HelpSystems
- 5. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 5 Labor Hardware purchases/leases Utilities/Telcomm Software licenses Cost Control and Budgeting
- 6. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 6 • Labor • Scalability and resource utilization • Automating outside IBM i • Security, BI, and HA • Outsourcing • Interview with John Dunn at Lamps Plus • Automation is a journey • Case studies Concerns
- 7. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 7 Labor Concerns • What is your vision for your team? Is your team onboard? • Your business is expanding, but not your IT budget • Frustration, quality of life, burnout, firefighting • Turnover, retraining, loss of experienced employee resources
- 8. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 8 Labor Focus without Automation • Hire more operations staff • Retraining new staff • How do we handle vacations or holidays • Sick time • How are new tasks deployed • IT audit reporting
- 9. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 9 Labor Benefits with Automation • Empowers staff to think about the business rather than mundane tasks • Process documentation • Stable staffing level • Staff education and training • Reduced need for off shift • Minimize on call • Job satisfaction • Better quality of life
- 11. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 11 Resources and Scalability Concerns • As business increases, so does staff • Hard to find qualified people • Always looking at increasing hardware spend • ITOA – IT Operations Analytics • Audits • Inter-platform politics
- 12. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 12 Resources and Scalability without Automation • Difficulty with inserting new tasks • Lag time between events • Unpredictable and inconsistent • Manual checklists, runbooks, and cheat sheets • Requires more staff • Negative impact on development • Impacts IT improvement plans
- 13. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 13 Resources and Scalability with Automation • Automation scales • Improves deployment • Easier to provide audit data • Predictable and consistent • Tasks are more event driven • Better utilization / no dead time between steps • Get more out of what you already own • Makes planning easier
- 14. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 14 Enterprise Workflow Concerns • Sharing data between systems and monitoring file transfers is critical – Document storage – Point of sales – Data Warehouse – FDIC required data • It’s no longer IBM i – those “other” systems are critical • DIY IT – your end users want raw data – (Think accounting/finance) • Timing can be critical • Inter-platform politics
- 15. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 15 • Timer jobs • Dummy files to trigger events • Problem determination difficulty • Rescheduling due to holidays or system downtime • Change control approval is complicated Enterprise Workflow without Automation
- 16. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 16 • Single enterprise scheduler • SLAs are built into the automation • Notification and escalation are built-in • DIY IT – your end users want raw data – (Think accounting/finance) • Timing can be critical • Think event-based Enterprise Workflow with Automation
- 18. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 18 Security, BI, and HA Concerns • Automation is not just the night processing • Automate security/audit reports and run at off hours • Automate BI data transfers and reporting reactive to nightly/weekly/monthly • HA role swap is way too manual • Data security group forgets about automation
- 19. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 19 Security, BI, and HA without Automation • IT audits are time consuming • Data is gathered manually • BI end users running heavy duty during peak hours • HA role swap is very command driven
- 20. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 20 Security, BI, and HA with Automation • Audit reports are distributed automatically • No IT involvement, direct to auditor – self service auditing! • Minimal BI data transfer latency • HA role swap is consistent – no forgotten steps • Easier to make incremental improvements
- 21. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 21 Outsourcing Concerns Built-in is Best • Aren’t going to address application automation needs • Aren’t going to address application message handling • Maintain status quo • Specialize in: – Monitoring – HA and backups – Software / hardware upgrade
- 23. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 23 John Dunn IT Operations Manager, Lamps Plus
- 24. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 24 Automation Is a Journey • Do you have the tools and skills? • What else can be automated in the organization? • Be an automation analyst/manager • Put automation into your job description
- 25. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 25 Recap • Labor costs • Scalability and resource utilization • Automating outside IBM i • Security, BI, and HA • Outsourcing won’t help • Automation is a journey • Case studies
- 26. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 26 What IT Problems Do We Solve? • Enterprise Scheduling and Business Process Automation – IBM i, AIX, UNIX, Linux, Windows • Monitoring (IBM i, Linux, AIX, Windows) • Security and Compliance (IBM i, AIX, Linux) • BI and Data Warehouse (IBM i) – Modernize your data access • Document Life Cycle Management – Electronic forms, signature, work flow, distribution • Network Monitoring • Backup and Recovery (IBM i) • SLA issues
- 27. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential.2/5/2016 27
- 28. © HelpSystems. Company Confidential. 28 Contact Information Thank you for attending! Chuck Losinski, HelpSystems +1 952-563-2790 chuck.losinski@helpsystems.com Tom Huntington, HelpSystems +1 952-563-1606 tom.huntington@helpsystems.com
Editor's Notes
- Record Button Polling Questions Remind of Chat
- Introduction: We want you to draw a clear line between managing your IT department with automation and without. Today imaging yourself was an IT director and you have the choice between automation or not, and
- Tom Cross reference organizational size or partition or industry or regulation – is there a correlation?
- Tom
- Chuck One of our focus areas during this discussion will be human resources. Your talent pool. Making them more productive. Proven technology, don’t hold off upgrading H/W. Maintenance will go up if you don’t upgrade. 5 years? Time to update. IBM i the green machine! Software licenses – keep them up! And why? Do you know what you own? Do you have shelfware? Dustyware? Hardly using what you own?
- Chuck Labor costs - Your business is expanding but not your IT budget! - Turnover, retraining, loss of experienced employee resources - Frustration, quality of life, burnout, firefighting Scalability and resource utilization - automation scales - tasks are more event driven - no dead-time between steps Automating outside IBM i - Document storage and file transfer are most common - Point of sales is an example as are FDIC required data Security, BI and HA Outsourcing won’t help - they aren’t going to address application scheduling - they aren’t going to address application messages Automation is a journey - the business will continue to change - software systems, hardware and OS will evolve – speed and features Case studies
- Chuck What are your labor concerns with automation and without
- Chuck Close your eyes, you are the IT director, what are your concerns if you aren’t automated? Don’t wait to automate, gather tribal (experience) knowledge, and get that into
- Chuck How does your focus change if you embrace automation? Don’t wait to automate, gather tribal (experience) knowledge, and get that into
- Tom
- Tom
- Tom Negative impact on development projects due to fire fighting – on call
- Chuck Are your end users divorcing themselves of IT? No more canned reports, end users want the raw data. DIY IT – your end users want raw data (think accounting/finance) – moving data off to the warehouse for query
- Chuck Are your end users divorcing themselves of IT? No more canned reports, end users want the raw data.
- Chuck Are your end users divorcing themselves of IT? No more canned reports, end users want the raw data.
- Tom
- Tom Other areas to automate
- Tom Given very little lead time to supply audit data Rekeying in spreadsheets Peak hour utilization needs to be spread out
- Tom Other areas to automate HA role swap production or testing – automate as much as possible (planning, predictability, emergency script, don’t rely on manual in the heat of the moment. Simplifies testing as well.
- Play the recording Aiming for Complete Automation John’s goal for Lamps Plus was to automate their evening shift, including cross-platform processing. The point-of-sale (POS) system uses Windows® servers and order management uses AIX, but warehouse, financials, and all of their production processing happens on IBM i. So, they use Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise job scheduling software on the Windows servers to alert them when store sales arrive; and they automatically send these files via FTP to the IBM i platform for processing. As John explains, “We used the Robot products to automate, to reduce overtime, and to monitor the QSYSOPR message queue. Robot ALERT is used to notify for both job monitors and message escalation—if a message comes up for a job, somebody knows about it. You don’t want to arrive in the morning, have no alerts or errors, and think everything is fine. Then you find out the reason there were no errors is because nothing ran. The checks and balances in our automated process notify us if something goes wrong, or if something doesn’t run by a certain time.” Cross-Platform Automation Lamps Plus uses Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise to take advantage of both enterprise scheduling and cross-system reactivity. John explains, “We run processes across multiple systems each night automatically. During the nightly process, multiple Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise jobs react to file events and control over one hundred other agents, legacy RPG, WMS, and FTP processes. We use OPAL® (OPerator Assistance Language), date objects, and the Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise built-in FTP process. Before, this was a manual process that took hours. “Now, everything runs in reaction to POS file arrivals. So, even if they arrive a bit late due to heavy online orders, the process still runs in sequence and fully automated. I get status updates when things run and special alerts from Robot when they don’t. With automation, Sunday actually becomes a day off, the night shift is unmanned, and the operators only have to work at night if there are errors.” Training and Future Goals John was really impressed with the training. “I’ve been getting my training from the HelpSystems support team. I’d never used Robot SCHEDULE or Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise before, but I’ve dealt with other scheduling tools and automation, so the concepts weren’t foreign. “The HelpSystems support team showed me how to use the products and offered some incredible ideas. They’d often say, ‘Have you thought about trying this?’ I mean, the first couple of months I was in awe. It was like, ‘Wow, this software has a lot more bells and whistles than any other software tool I’ve used.’ In fact, there were so many, I didn’t even know which questions to ask. We looked at Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise because we wanted to manage all of our systems from a single application. I didn’t want to use multiple schedulers—a Windows scheduler, cron on AIX, and another scheduler on the IBM i–have everything time-based, and hope it all comes together. Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise is perfect because I have Windows jobs, AIX jobs, and IBM i jobs reacting to each other.” A Great ROI with Robot John is also excited about the immediate payoff of their automation efforts. “As for our return on investment (ROI), comparing the six months after we started using Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise to the six months prior, we reduced overtime by 36 percent—not to mention fewer errors and a better quality of life. Once we’re completely automated, I think we’ll see some real big reductions in errors and overtime.” As John explains, the automation software has become so popular that it now has its own in-house identity. “At first, it was the operators and the application team saying, ‘Hey, can Robot do this?’ Then, it started to snowball. Now, we call the two of them [Robot SCHEDULE and Robot SCHEDULE Enterprise] ‘Mr. Robot’. Typically, we say, ‘We need to put Mr. Robot to work’. ‘Okay, so what does he need to do?’”
- Tom
- Chuck Informercial