Mission Critical to Application Availability
The mainframe skills gap is a well-known issue. This shortage of knowledgeable people with the right skills not only applies to mainframe application developers, but also to mainframe infrastructure performance and capacity professionals.
Skills Gap Hurts the Business
And it is not just a matter of recruiting the right person. Even for the smartest individuals, it takes many years to understand mainframe performance and capacity management the way the current experts do. This makes the increasing rate with which those experts retire a significant threat to organizations.
What’s more, the tools that the experts rely on are often decades old homegrown reports that require programming skills as well as deep, up-to-date z/OS knowledge. With that expertise leaving the company, there will be more serious service level disturbances that hurt the business, more time spent on firefighting, and it will be less likely that cost inefficiencies are identified and addressed.
Performance and capacity management is mission critical to application availability, and this skills gap demands immediate attention and a new, effective approach to close the gap.
Key Challenges
- Retirements are reducing staffing levels to a minimum, and remaining experts are too busy
- It is extremely difficult to recruit new staff that already has the required expertise
- Developing new hires into deep experts on z/OS is a process that takes many years
- The homegrown tools were not designed for today’s complex mainframe environments and are too difficult and time-consuming to maintain, especially once the expert is gone
Analytics as a Force Multiplier
The most effective way for mainframe sites to bridge the skills gap is to start using a smart IT Operations Analytics solution that contains built-in z/OS knowledge, instead of having new people spend years learning how to program and interpret static reports in a home-grown toolset.
Smart Automated Analytics
IntelliMagic Vision is such a solution. It automatically analyzes mainframe measurement data and flags risks and anomalies before it presents the results in a dynamic reporting system, with explanations along the way. This makes both current analysts and new hires way more effective across all areas of the z/OS infrastructure.
Getting new hires up to speed will be greatly accelerated, and the smaller team will be able to spend time on proactive performance and capacity management instead of on firefighting.
Download the executive summary (PDF) about the skills gap.
Resources About the Skills Gap
How Mainframe Performance Teams are Solving Their Skills Gap Challenges | IntelliMagic zAcademy
This webinar discusses proven strategies being leveraged by companies to optimize mainframe availability and performance.
IntelliMagic Vision Adds SMF Field Name Mapping to Live Report Editor
February 27, 2023 | IntelliMagic Vision version 12.1 provides the capability to easily reference and add variables by SMF field names.
IntelliMagic Vision Version 12.0 Enhances Collaboration and Training with New Shareable Dashboard Templates
February 6, 2023 | By introducing shareable Dashboard Templates, a platform is created for exchanging technical knowledge on the various z/OS components within the IntelliMagic Vision expert user community.