Timothy: Some good points. There is also a issue when you try and reduce operators. The biggest issue I have seen is that the number of IPL's goes up and small problems become large problems. On the other end I have also seen the "untrained" people end up calling the systems people and they(systems people) are exhausted by the next morning as you end up on the phone with them for long periods of time. Meanwhile the systems people get really pe'oed at management and refuse to take phone calls. Then it becaomes a pissing match between departments. No one wins at this and mean while the good sysprog people just can't get out of the place fast enough. Also you have to tell new people that they should expect long phone calls in the middle of the night.
Ed ________________________________ From: Timothy Sipples <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, March 13, 2011 11:39:10 PM Subject: Re: Cheryl's List #148 Responding to Linda, I think you'll want to compare business cases with your management. Case #1: Business as usual. Case #2: Minimize the cost of overnight operators as much as possible (through increased automation, alerting, etc.), and compare the cost of that skeleton crew (of one?) to the likely sub-capacity license savings. It seems odd to me that #1 would make financial sense, but odd is not impossible. And then.... Case #3: Case #2, plus reallocate some non-mainframe operators by shifting workload to the mainframe, starting with some workloads that can fill utilization "valleys." Mainframes are *extremely* operator-efficient -- so if there's a focus on controlling operations costs, go actually control operations costs. If you add workload to a mainframe, typically the operations staff doesn't even change. - - - - - Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect Value Creation & Complex Deals Team IBM Growth Markets (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
