Written by Todd Havekost on March 12, 2026
As a member of the do-it-yourself investing community, I analyze lots of data to evaluate and make decisions about my current investments as well as to identify potential new ones. To perform this analysis, I rely heavily on self-service tooling, in my case primarily that provided by Morningstar. In this data-rich scenario where one finding often prompts immediate analysis of a related metric, I have the luxury of making timely data-driven decisions.
Now imagine instead of having immediate access to powerful easy-to-use self-service tooling, my access to data was limited to submitting reporting requests to a small “reporting team” at Morningstar who would provide best-effort reports within a few days containing my requested data elements. The scope of my analyses would be severely limited, and the quality of my decisions would be adversely impacted by this dramatically reduced access to data (both in terms of metrics and timeliness). "What an unimaginable scenario" you might say (especially in today’s world where we operate with apps on connected devices that provide intuitive self-service access to countless types of data).
Yet this is precisely the scenario many IT mainframe professionals find themselves working under even to this day. Much of the mainframe industry continues to do SMF performance reporting the way they have done it for 30+ years, limited to a small, centralized group of tenured staff who are the only ones capable of using their complex tooling to generate the reports needed to satisfy analysis requests that come in from across the organization. Many may not be aware that any other model is even feasible.
Risks of Operating without Access to Measurement Data
When a developer doesn't have easy self-service access to data indicating the impact of a recent change he or she implemented in the test environment on transaction response time or volume or CPU consumption, what is the outcome? Likely moving forward without the insights that measurement data could have provided to validate or enhance the quality or effectiveness of that change.
How would you assess the negative impact to the speed and quality of decision-making across an IT organization that results from severely limited access to mainframe measurement data?
Democratizing SMF Data
But a few sites are taking an entirely different approach that can be described as democratizing their SMF data. Data democratization can apply across all types of data and represents the process of making digital information accessible to the average non-technical user, removing bottlenecks created by IT or data specialists. By implementing self-service, user-friendly tools and fostering a data-driven culture, organizations enable employees across all functions to access, understand, and act on data to drive faster, more informed decisions.
I recently had an opportunity to participate in a webinar with John Shaw from USAA in which he described several ways his company is democratizing their SMF data and the benefits they are realizing from this approach. These ways included:
- Offering training on self-service access to SMF data (using IBM Z IntelliMagic Vision) across the IT organization that is widely utilized by and benefits both technical and management staff at all levels
- Hosting weekly IT wide optimization meetings where application and infrastructure teams collaborate to review live reports on key metrics and drill down to investigate any anomalies in real-time during the meeting
- Assigning mainframe transaction workloads to CMDB-aligned multi-level business application definitions so that users can easily view metrics associated with their applications of interest
- Fostering a data-driven culture that permeates their problem determination and performance analysis processes
Readers interested in viewing the entire webinar can use this link.
Modernized tooling that includes capabilities like these provides the framework essential to enable effective self-service access to SMF data.
Here are examples of (1) an intuitive user-friendly dialog that enables self-service users to customize the ad hoc reports needed to make data-driven decisions in their area of influence and (2) a report that might be referenced by developers to provide insights into their transaction of interest.
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When it comes to your SMF data, do your IT employees have access to self-service, user-friendly tools, are you fostering a data-driven culture, and are you enabling your employees across all functions to access, understand, and act on data to drive faster, more informed decisions? If not, would your business benefit from beginning to move in that direction?