That noise you hear is me, standing up and cheering in the background.
YES!!! What the IBM teams responsible for the components you mentioned seem to have lost sight of years ago, is what it's like to have to perform system maintenance/changes during a very brief and packed 'tech window', usually on the weekend.
Yeah, I know - the objective for years has been to enable making changes dynamically and not requiring system outages to do it, but the same folks who advocate that also do not seem to understand that many large companies, especially those in the financial sector, still are unwilling to take those kinds of risks during the business day or even during the work week "after hours".
A former employer of mine was so cautious about that sort of thing that even something so simple as closing and re-opening a single VSAM file in CICS required gaining the approval of 4 levels of management, and that approval was very rarely given. In the more than 10 years I worked there, I only remember it being done less than a dozen times.
Doing changes dynamically is 'nice and convenient', but all it takes is one 'ooops' to ruin your whole day - and career.
The advantages of having batch interfaces are that they allow preparing the scripted implementation and validation processes well in advance of 'go time' which allows for multiple reviews, discussion, and evaluation involving multiple people; plus once all that's done the actual implementation/validation is much faster, taking less time than doing it interactively via some GUI.
The ability to make dynamic changes is nice - in a sandbox, non-production environment.
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J Robert Garrett
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Original Message:
Sent: Mon January 11, 2021 10:50 AM
From: Konstantinos Zafiropoulos
Subject: Batch interface would be highly desirable for products like WLM, HCD , DFSMS
Dear all,
I am using various subsystems of z/OS like SMP/E, RACF, DB2, CICS etc. The interaction to these products can be done either using batch jobs or using dialogs under ISPF. However there are some products like WLM, HCD, DFSMS where there is no support for batch interaction but only through ISPF dialogs. It would be very desirable to have the ability to interact with these products by creating and submitting jobs (even though using TSO or console commands) . By using batch the risk of typo error could be mitigated while the efficiency could be increased.
Kind regards
KonstantinosSend
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Konstantinos Zafiropoulos
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