As you step into the new year, explore this curated set of educational sessions hosted by IBM i experts, designed to inspire innovative IT strategies in 2024 and guide you through an evolving landscape.
Encryption: The Last Line of Defense for Your IBM i Data
The potential consequences of a data breach are substantial – IBM i security experts Carol Woodbury and Pauline Ayala explore the escalating threat of cyberattacks on sensitive data in this session. Gain an understanding of the attacks that target data, how to implement encryption as a proactive measure, and get insights that bolster your defenses so you can mitigate risks associated with data breaches.
Proven Modernization Strategies for IT and IBM i Applications
What does IBM i modernization mean to you? Perhaps it's a simple interface tweak or deploying a mobile app. But for many, the scope is broad, involving modern tech for agility, cloud hosting for scalability, or AI for process improvements. Review this session by Chris Koppe where he emphasizes the importance of starting with a strategic plan that aligns with business goals. He explores opportunities for process enhancement, steps to build a comprehensive strategy, and discusses incremental approaches to achieve quick wins.
Bridge the IBM i (AS/400) Skills Gap with Application Support Services
As your seasoned RPG and COBOL programmers retire, finding qualified resources can be challenging. Ambrose Marton and Doug Artis lead this insightful session on leveraging IBM i application support services to bridge that gap. Discover the effectiveness of 'fractional' resourcing, support for various packaged applications, and rapid onboarding with automated documentation. Learn from success stories and address common concerns like covering sick programmers or struggling with replacements.
Implementing Zero Trust Security on Your IBM i
In response to evolving cyber threats, companies are increasingly adopting a zero trust approach. Review this session led by security experts Carol Woodbury and Pauline Ayala to better understand the idea of zero trust security on IBM i. The discussion also covers implementation strategies, emphasizing the need for strong authentication, device validation, system activity monitoring, encryption, and MFA to protect against internal & external security threats.
IBM i Application Intelligence and 60% Productivity Gains
X-Analysis, a tool trusted by developers across many industries, helps you unlock the full potential of IBM i applications and data. Review this technical session to explore its capabilities – industry expert Ray Everhart guides you through a quick start with the tool, explores impact analysis, real-time documentation, business rules extraction, data insights, and code quality assessment. You’ll also learn how X-Analysis empowers IT leaders to make better business decisions and boosts developer productivity by up to 60%.
Why IBM i (AS/400) Remote Managed Services is the Future of IT Support
Dealing with the challenges of retiring IBM i skillsets, limited resources, and growing business demands? Raymond Hammell highlights how you can optimize IBM i operations, reduce costs, and enhance availability with 24x7x365 support, remote NOC and SOC monitoring, backup processes, and disaster recovery. He also discusses ways to free up your IT resources for core business tasks.
How to Develop Web and Mobile Applications on IBM i with WebSmart
In this comprehensive technical demo, Greg Patterson introduces WebSmart, a tool that helps RPG developers to quickly create web & mobile applications on IBM i. You will see him explore templates generating HTML, CSS, PHP, or RPG ILE, ways to leverage WebSmart's IDE and productivity features, and delves into real-world examples like B2B order entry, eCommerce, invoicing, and inquiries.
Keep learning: Check out more educational webinars led by industry experts here and stay up to date on the latest IBM i trends.
After seeing researchers successfully clone a sheep, this was the first thought that crossed my mind: “If we could clone IBM i developers, our problems would be solved.”
The population of legacy developers is rapidly dwindling and, when you have only a few RPG or COBOL developers left, the prospect of trying to replace one of them is daunting. While I haven’t figured out how to clone developers yet, I have found out how to solve the problem of staffing our clients’ projects.
Let's start by imagining a situation in which, right when a trusted legacy resource is needed for a special project, that person announces retirement – or maybe he or she won the lottery and is leaving the company (kind of the same thing!). Either way, you are now faced with two challenges: first, finding a replacement resource, and second, onboarding that person. At this point, you probably wish you had begun planning for this sooner.
Onboarding a technical resource can be a costly and disruptive process, because it requires quick and efficient training that often involves the time and effort of numerous people – including other valuable resources. Add to this the fact that a new resource can quickly become unmotivated when their onboarding process is inefficient, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Have you ever seen or experienced a training process that begins by letting a new developer simply log in and poke around an application? Such a process employs trial-and-error learning, which can be extremely stressful and makes for a steep learning curve. It’s not an ideal situation.
Now imagine that this newly-trained resource gets discouraged and leaves after six months. This slow, painful, learn-on-your-own, trial-and-error training process has to begin all over again. When the next developer starts, he or she too will struggle through the same agonizing process. Will this person eventually come around? Or will this resource also leave? Isn’t there a way to onboard highly specialized professionals without tying up other employees or using ineffective techniques?
After seeing numerous new employees struggle to settle into their new roles, I jotted down a few ideas of how to make the onboarding process easier:
Using these two simple onboarding approaches will save developers, clients and employers lots of time, stress and money. There are definitely more things that can be done to make the training and onboarding even more successful (examples such as using a “buddy system” and having a detailed checklist spring to mind), but from all of the headaches I've experienced in attempting to introduce new developers to old applications, I've learned that these two steps are the most critical.
Want to learn more about how we solve resource challenges? Contact Us
At face value, the significant cost savings made possible through outsourcing is a difficult business proposition to resist for many IT organizations. On the other hand, companies who turn to outsourcing often end up experiencing substandard quality and a loss of IT control. Either of these outcomes easily counters the promised cost savings.
But the tug-of-war between cost, quality and control isn’t a foregone conclusion in the outsourcing world. There are approaches and partners that offer all of the benefits without the tribulations.
Here are some strategies you can employ to ensure your outsourcing experience is as productive and positive as possible.
1. Find the right partner
Look for an adaptable business partner that is trustworthy, capable and flexible, rather than a vendor that will try locking you into a specific contract. A true outsourcing partner will strive to address your specific needs of the moment, while adjusting the partnership as necessary to fit those needs as they evolve over time. Above all, you need to find a partner company that is as committed to the success of your business as a key employee would be.
2. Aim for a balance between offshore and onshore resources
The right balance of offshore and onshore resources is key to building an effective outsourced team. Pushing too much offshore without proper oversight might save on costs, but may lead to loss of quality and control. Maintaining too much work onshore will drive up overhead and costs. We recommend keeping senior technical leads close to you, so they can participate in the daily conversations and be the bridge to the offshore team. This way, work can be arranged into easily digestible chunks, while being properly monitored and measured.
3. Avoid hiring “yes” people
Your outsourcing partner should bring expertise and knowledge to the table. They aren’t there to agree with you because you sign the cheque. Your outsourcing partner’s employees should be continuously encouraged to question the status quo, challenge management, and feel sufficiently empowered to push back against how things were always done in the past.
With the current push toward agile development methodology, quick decision-making and ability to adjust and adapt to changing conditions are key elements of a successful development environment. Ask your prospective outsourcers about their developer turnover, and talk to the developers themselves to determine if they have a happy, supportive work environment. This additional due diligence might eliminate risk from the outsourcing relationship and save you the cost increases and productivity hit that occur when developers transition elsewhere.
4. Look for specialists instead of generalists
Finding a good outsourcer amongst a sea of options isn’t enough. You need to aim for a great fit, and that means finding a partner that offers a clear and understandable differentiator. Outsourcing firms that undertake the enormous responsibility and challenge of earning your trust should amaze you not only with their developers’ skillset, but also with world-leading tools and industry expertise.
You probably have been enhancing, tweaking and customizing your software for decades so that it intimately reflects your way of doing business. Even if a newly on-boarded developer is conversant with your development language and systems, that person’s knowledge of your business will be very limited. It can take six months to a year before even the most senior developer is fully productive. But imagine the productivity benefits, should that developer arrive armed with impact analysis and documentation tools that serve to demystify your complex and highly customized applications. Automated analysis and documentation tools can reduce ramp-up time.
Outsourcing has inherent risks, and IT organizations make bad decisions and choose the wrong providers everyday. But if you approach your outsourcing relationship strategically and find the right partner, with the right mindset and skillset, you’ll soon broaden your organization’s horizons with capable developers who are able to tackle problems head-on and deliver demonstrable value.
A fresh set of external eyes can often find, understand and resolve problems that seemed daunting or even unsolvable. And an unbiased group of developers can find new avenues for innovation, allowing you to breathe new life into your software applications and extend their usefulness once again.
