I agree with Catherine's comments on organizational structure. However, in a past employer a change was made, not in reporting structure, but rather in terms of functional responsibilities, a change that blew our minds.
As in your case, we had Operators and System Programmers. Sys Progs performed system upgrades and development, but there was also a Coverage group which was part of Operations. Coverage Progs were first level support for Operations and pretty much had interchangeable skills with Sys Progs who were second level support. Operators were less technical, basically only followed procedural scripts written by Cov Progs or Sys Progs. Here's where it got interesting: At one point, the powers that be decided they should fire all Operators and replace them with Coverage Progs. Cov Progs already worked 24x7 shifts anyway, whereas Sys Progs did not (except for being on call of course, hate that pager that is sutured to your waistline). So basically, the Coverage group was subdivided into the original Coverage functions and those that also manned consoles. Whilst not "operating", they continued their overlap with Sys Progs in terms of development, mostly for things like system monitoring tools. Calling anyone an Operator became politically incorrect, as all of us Sys Progs soon found out. As you may suspect, the idea was proposed as a cost saving measure, and the reason it actually worked was because of the massive amount of system automation that had been put into place over the years, with one big push in the most recent years. Apparently, paying people to man consoles which hardly needed any attention, people with no other responsibilities, did not make sense. So, Operators went the same way as our Tape Hangers, who were all dismissed once there weren't anymore tapes to hang (round or square). There were still a few tape drives around just in case, but if we Sys Progs ever needed any tape mounts we had to go out on the floor and do it ourselves. It's a new world. Regards, Rick Giz [EMAIL PROTECTED] 770-781-3206 _____ From: The IBM z/VM Operating System [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of McBride, Catherine Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 6:31 AM To: IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU Subject: Re: IS Organization question Perhaps company size isn't as much of a factor as the role of I.T. within the company. If your business is I.T. or your "product" is created, stored and delivered via computer, you ARE a big company from an I.T perspective. Ideally the technical and operations groups are separate, and report to someone with enough savvy to evaluate the often-conflicting priorities of both areas. The other two scenarios could be great or a disaster depending upon personalities. If the Operations Manager has been a systems programmer during his/her career, having the sys progs report to Ops might work. OTOH if the Ops manager has the technical aptitude of a turnip you'll never get your money's worth out of your tech staff. Conversely, if the Systems Programming manager has no operations backout, you may end up with the latest, greatest everything, using every new feature under the sun whether you needed 'em or not, but the production won't get done because the system's so unstable. Been in all three scenarios over the course of my career, and having both groups report to the next level up is far and away THE best. Bill Pettit wrote: We have been working with a consultant that has made several organizational change suggestions regarding Information Systems at our company. One of those suggestions is moving our Computer Operations section be part of and managed by the Systems Programming manager. <snip
