Timothy has some points and some not so valid points.
Lets put it one way Timothy works for IBM and as such has an inherent
bias about the subject matter.
As for my opinion, I think its worth a few bodies (currently employed
at your place of business) that are probably senior senior types.
I think its a sound investment if you let them loose on your current
system with the idea of suggesting place for improvement for say a
month.
Let them come back with suggestions on how to improve the current
"system" Let a manager loose that is good at crunching numbers and
good at system analysis and see if can come up with some numbers ie
cost/time savings.
He/she should be able to do so although don't hold his feet to the
fire as this should be an exercise in coming up with ideas not hard
facts.
Both groups can't be wed to the current system there is too much "we
have always done it this way"
Also rest assured that any system can be improved. As to how much it
is an entirely different answer.
I have seen a system that was moribund and with a few tweaks like say
a scheduling system and oh yes a MVS install shave 5 hours off of
nightly processing. Tweaks looks at cobol source and changing FD's to
block contains 0 records and let MVS handle the IO will save you many
hours.
I am all for upgrading when its needed but make sure you have tweaked
all the easy things first. Things like wtor's can cost time in
nightly processing that is an easy scan of source libs and or
syslogs. These are cheap things to do.
I have named a few and others can pipe up and give other examples if
they wish, but do the easy things first before heading to the wallet.
Ed
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