Delivering software and services at the speed that the market demands, requires IT teams to work together, and iterate rapidly. To be responsive to business demands, enterprise development teams need to use common practices and methods of delivery. By empowering teams to use a single pipeline, with common tooling and practices, teams across the enterprise can attract new talent, innovate faster, and more effectively deliver business value.
With so many mission-critical apps running on Z, to help organizations accelerate their modernization journey, we provided a red paper that talks about different starting points and a prescriptive approach of how to go forward in those vectors. You can get your copy here. One of the themes in this red paper is about bringing agility to the z software development organization with enterprise DevOps adoption in the Z world. To learn more, join this community and join the conversations and explore topics related to the CI/CD pipeline
Moving an organization to standard tooling and practices requires changes to processes, technologies, and roles. Creating an integrated pipeline starts with having a single SCM like Git and the use of Git Workflow. Questions often asked with this move by many who manage the traditional SCM on Z are “ What happens to my job?” “Do we need people with totally different skill sets?” DevOps Engineer is the new role that is considered critical in the new world. That role typically does not exist in the library manager world on Z today. The SysProg may worry, “Are we adding more people to do the same thing? Or will we have some roles eliminated?” The answer to these questions is “NO!”. The role of the library manager SysProg evolves to become a DevOps Engineer.
A common misconception is that SysProgs who maintain the library managers are just maintaining that product. That is not true at all. SysProgs who maintain these library managers, rarely do the product upgrade/maintenance work. Given many of these products are in a maintenance-only mode, there is nothing much to upgrade. Then what do they do? They maintain the build processes. Since these library managers do not have out-of-the-box build/deploy capabilities, this remains a key responsibility for the DevOps Engineer. Many of the current workforce were not present when the painstaking work was done to automate build/deploy with these library managers decades ago. New tools provide automation and capabilities that make it easier to respond to new regulations quickly. I asked a library manager SysProg to list down the actions that they do in addition to applying patches to the library manager software. Here is the list and next to it is the equivalent function in new world.
Let’s start with mundane, boring, manual tasks that burden SysProgs and go away in the new world.
Legacy library manager SysProg Role Today
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How does that get automated?
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Liaise with the security team to create access control rules and maintain access for library manager application users.
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Setup Role Based Access Control for all of the tools used, (e.g. Git/EWM/Dependency Based Build, etc.) and empower teams to configure it through proper approval channels
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Create / Maintain approver groups and add people to these approver groups.
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Link approvers to proper LDAP/Active Directory groups, so that approvers are automatically added/removed
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Generating all types of library manager reports for customer audits.
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Empower auditors to generate the reports as needed.
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Report on security violations
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Empower CISO team to generate reports on security violations
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Identifying and resolving problems/errors faced by application users with the library manager
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Errors are self-explanatory for developers to understand and act
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Updating / Adding new security rules associated with the library manager.
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Empower end users to add people to correct LDAP/AD groups
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Updating / Adding new security rules associated with the library manager.
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Empower end users to add people to correct LDAP/AD groups
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Support for housekeeping jobs, which runs daily, weekly, and monthly.
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Automate housekeeping to avoid babysitting these jobs
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Wow. With so many mundane tasks out of the way, SysProgs can now focus on high-value tasks that require your expertise,
Legacy library manager SysProg Role Today
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SysProg (DevOps Engineer) Role tomorrow
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Perform required activities for a compiler (Cobol,PL/1 etc) version upgrade
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Configure the build engine to pick up the right compiler and keep development moving in a more agile way.
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Create / Maintain System, Subsystem, and type definitions under library manager environments
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Create SCM Repos, Deployment targets (aka environments) making it easier for developers to do parallel development.
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Create / Maintain library manager processor groups, processors, and symbolic parms
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Maintain build types, deploy types, and environment variables for target environments helping developers worry about their application and not about the infrastructure.
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Customize or maintain library manager configuration
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Product configuration changes that are standardized across the enterprise make it easier for anyone to do
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Create/Maintain automated library manager package shipment to multiple LPAR’s.
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Maintain deployment processes in an enterprise standard tool.
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Liaise with developers to discuss SDLC requirements.
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Liaise with developers to discuss on pipeline requirements.
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Provide technical direction for problem recovery
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As the SME and help developers troubleshoot failures in the pipeline
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Support for housekeeping jobs, which runs daily, weekly, and monthly.
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Automate housekeeping jobs so they can run independently of oversight. Occasional updates may be required, but this also comes off the list of mundane tasks.
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As you can see, there are a lot of tasks that need functional expertise like Cobol compiler upgrades, that are not changing in the new world. There are also a lot of manual tasks that are automated (e.g., adding/removing approvers that are now getting tied to your LDAP/AD groups. This clearly shows that functional knowledge about a mainframe shop is needed in the new world too. And it is also clear that many activities become easier, are well documented, and transforms to web-based tools that everybody in the organization uses.
In short, success in enterprise transformation heavily depends on the SysProgs of today becoming the DevOps Engineers in the new world. Enterprise relies on your deep understanding of core mainframe build/deploy steps to accelerate the journey. We have seen many successful transformations where a legacy library manager system programmer moved into the “DevOps Engineer” role, a pivotal role that enables you to focus on high-value tasks that enable developers to move faster and more independently with you to guide and drive standardization. It is possible, and it is the ideal transformation. Ready to skill up and start your transformation? Go here.