z/OS Modernization, when all you really need is a knife.
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I look at z/OS modernization like the lyrics in the Alanis Morissette song Ironic, “It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife’’.
Imagine this: your boss comes to you and says ‘’Hey we need you to modernize your z/OS component’’. You the good employee that you are, say “Ok boss no problem, I will get right on it”. As they leave your office that is the moment you say to yourself “How am I going to do this?”.
The problem with the modernization journey is that there are so many different tools available, such as Ansible, z/OSMF, Zowe, ZOAU, and others. What you need to do first is stop and ask yourself, “What is it we are trying to modernize to begin with?”.
Imagine if you wanted to remodel your kitchen, and the contractor you hired never asked you what you wanted the redesign to look like. Instead, they just showed off all of their fancy tools.
I understand the “why” part of modernization, it’s the “what” part that I struggle with. Is the goal to simplify tedious tasks, solve pain points, modernize your component so that it uses industry standards, or all the above and more? These are the questions that need to be answered before you even think about what tool you want to use.
So, the real task here isn’t for me to give them ten thousand spoons when all they need is a knife. The task is for me to understand what would be beneficial to my client. To do this, I can’t assume I know the answer. Instead, I need to ask the right questions. Clients themselves struggle with the “how do we modernize” question. This is why the answer needs to be a collaborative one.
As I think more about modernization and have used the modernization tools du jour, I constantly ask myself, “is this better, and am I making it easier for the client?”. It’s as if sometimes we change things because we feel a need to change.
My take on modernization is take some of the complex tasks we created over the years that make people feel as if a PhD is needed to understand them, and make it such that the common person can do the task. Imagine if the task you were given was to cook a hamburger, but before you could cook it you needed to know the entire process of how that hamburger made its way from eating grass in a field to the store where you purchased it.
The modernization journey is just that, a journey, and it’s a journey that we need to take together with our clients. It must be a collaborative effort with the result being something meaningful, and not just change for change’s sake.
Since I really didn’t know how I was going to modernize my component, and the boss wouldn’t really want to listen to me explain it was a journey, I decided to just tell him this: “I am looking at using AI with Watson technology to do cognitive processing on hybrid cloud data using REST APIs written in Python stored in GitHub repositories”. This sounds cool but basically was just me saying, “I HAVE NO IDEA”.
So, before I start on my modernization journey, I will focus on how I provide the knife instead of ten thousand spoons.
A great read on the picking the right tool for the job is this article written by Frank DeGilio titled “Ansible, z/OSMF, and ZOWE” .
Happy journeys to all on your road to modernization!
