Mainframe modernization meeting

After a sumptuous coffee break with cookies, donuts and sandwiches, everyone reconvened in the meeting room with Mr. Grizzly still struggling to get to the projector screen to continue his presentation.?

During the coffee break Mr. Grizzly had left a WhatsApp message for Mr. Lion, the Senior? manager DBA to join the meeting for a few hours.

Mr. Lion was a bit upset looking at the message on his smartphone and gave out a huh.. “Now this, these management meetings never end” said the Lion. Waved hand to his junior associate Mr. Panther to continue monitoring the resource usage on console and instructed if any job with ‘not’ production creeps in during the business hours, feel free to purge it. ? Mr. Lion started walking to the elevator to take him to executive level.?

Mr. Owl while tapping his feet on the floor, and looking as if in deep thoughts with closed eyes, suddenly asked “ Mr. Grizzly, I know that mainframes can send and receive data files from external systems, but would it not be a overhead to extract the DB tables first and then transmit with a job running on production resources?” Mr. Lion had just entered the room, and ears jumped 90 degrees the moment he heard “production resources” and looked frantically around the room to find a face who could answer. By this time the lights started dimming and the screen was bright again. Mr. Lion found a chair for himself and settled with a grunt.?

Mr. Grizzly , with a little burp started replying to Mr. Owl,” Yes Sir, I agree, however, I was about to propose two part approach for the OLTP and OLAP needs ”Grizzly continued ” How about we create the data mart in cloud on the fly directly extracting final state data from DB2 tables or where ever in mainframe ecosystem we land the final state? and for the OLTP needs why not go about API way?”

Mr. Lion felt as if he was transported to a different world where Greek and Latin were the languages spoken. He was trying hard to catch up to the discussion, and somewhere in his mind's eye he frowned a little at Mr. Grizzly. Mr. Lion controlled his emotions and acknowledged a brief smile from Ms. Peacock.

Mr. Owl said “ Grizzly my dear do you have a picture to put your thoughts in perspective, I find it hard to follow your technology jargon?”

Mr. Grizzly replied “ I am so sorry Mr. Owl, let me bring the diagram up on the screen”, and looked through the upper frame of his spectacles towards his associate. Mr. Grizzly’s associate Ms. Swan immediately received the message and quickly brought the diagram up.

Image Credits : Salesforce Einstein TCRM, Trailhead?

Grizzly continued “ Mr. Owl, we already have multiple licenses of Salesforce being used at our organization, and Einstein Discovery & TCRM can be used here to bring value to our decision making layer. There are ways and connectors available through Salesforce, Mulesoft and other third party providers which will be able to sync up the data living in mainframe databases. We get this data into something called sync(a staging storage) and then create datasets in Einstein TCRM, these can then be manipulated, transformed, and thousand other functions can be performed on data to get the desired dataset for consumption either for dashboards, reports or even for machine learning applications through Einstein Discovery. In short we do ETL, analytics and consume data for statistical data analysis in Einstein TCRM, pretty powerful and neat” Mr. Grizzly took a breath after such a long outpour, asked for the bottle of water, gulped down the entire quantity in a few seconds.

Mr. Tiger was listening in rapt attention until now and as he got the opportunity to ask since Grizzly was catching up his breath, said ” So Mr. Grizzly, assuming we have set up the pipeline successfully, and the data transmission from left to right is also happening. Could you confirm that time to develop and deploy these promised visualizations and models will be less than what we currently spend?”

Grizzly grinned and with a twinkle in his eye said” The time to deliver the presentation layer will be reduced by more than 50% to say the least Mr. Tiger. In fact, the biggest advantage will be that models developed using our valuable data source can be deployed back to production and monitored in Einstein TCRM itself for their running accuracy. Deployment of statistical models has always been a huge challenge, and this wonderful feature of Salesforce Einstein TCRM gives us the ability to go live in days rather than months we currently have to wait”? Mr. Tiger seemed satisfied and with a broad smile looked at Mr. Koala who was patiently hearing Grizzly’s reasoning.?

Ms. Peacock took a sip from her freshly brewed chamomile tea and sniffed the fragrance emanating from the vapors, and looked towards Mr. Grizzly and said” One question Mr. Grizzly, a little off the track though”. Mr. Grizzly replied “ by all means Ma’am”.?

“Last week I met our newly appointed Director of Digital front office, she raised some concerns that few teams in customer service department are suffering from Swivel Chair syndrome, I hope you know Mr. Grizzly what I mean” said Ms. Peacock, and continued “ Agents have to jump to multiple screens in order to resolve a customer query or a request, she was referring to the order enquiries and updates servicing team, and of course CICS screens are indeed one of those many screens”.?

Mr. Grizzly replied “ Thank you Ms. Peacock for bringing this up, I am aware of this issue from our service teams. Allow me to answer this piece for you in my proposal for OLTP needs ”

Ms. Swan clicked the presentation and brought the above picture on screen, Mr. Grizzly gave a swift thumbs up to her, and quickly turned around to seek everybody’s attention, and asked, “ Something like this?” Ms. Peacock replied almost immediately “ Affirmative ! “

Mr. Grizzly continued “ Swivel chairs are prone to errors and are not employee friendly either. Probability of making a human error increases multifold, time to resolution increases, customer remains longer on phone wondering what the agent is up to, agent is struggling to find the information in multiple different systems, trying to make a sense, connect to it then figuring out the best way to help the customer. This is a perfect recipe to bring down your customer satisfaction NPS score” Mr. Koala looked tense but no one noticed, moreover he was master at the art of concealing his emotions. Mr. Tiger leaned a bit, murmured something in Mr. Koala’s ear very softly and then sat straight on his chair.

Image Credits - IBM

Grizzly pointed to the screen and said “ We are already using the APIs in our enterprise architecture, why not API enable our Mainframe Core applications and programs, expose the siloed functionality in mainframe to outside applications within the enterprise, and may be a few to public access.”

Mr. Koala said in a calming tone” But Mr. Grizzly didn’t you start the day by saying we get rid of the Mainframe? Remove dependency , something like that ?”

Mr. Grizzly smiled “ Did I? "and then with a brief smile started “ Yes Mr. Koala, we are removing the dependency of a siloed system by integrating it with our existing systems that will give us the benefits of both the worlds, rather a hybrid solution is what I am arriving at. Mainframe processing is significantly faster, accurate, reliable, secure, and above all the application logic in this ecosystem is something which is specific to us, we as a company, its custom COBOL we wrote unique to our business needs, rewriting this entire application suite will be extremely expensive, time consuming, arduous and risky for the business operations”. Ms. Peacock and Ms. Koala let out a breath of relief , while Grizzly continued “ Apart from the above API platform for system Z, there are other RESTful API platform providers as well, whom we can consider”

“Coming back to Mr. Peacock’s Swivel chair query, the API interface will enable the service team’s primary application, is it the Salesforce Service cloud or Service Now?, can talk to mainframe COBOL modules and get the data in those few fields which are required. This will do away with the CICS screens, and the same application which agent is using can communicate with mainframe resident data 'bi directionally' meaning not only fetching the data but updating in mainframe database as well without looking at CICS UI. For them it will be as if the base application logic ran and got all the customer data required by the service agent to handle the query. Ms. Swan , could you please share the links to all the API resources with attendees, and those videos too “ said Grizzly.

Ms. Swan nodded in affirmative and said “ Sure Mr. Grizzly, I will send out an email with all resources, links and further readings”

Mr. Owl looked at Ms. Swan and said” Hey Swan, I sent something to you on COBOL could you bring that up. I was a COBOL programmer back in the day”?

Ms. Swan looked at Grizzly, and who nodded in agreement to blow it up on screen.

Loud laughter echoed in the room, Ms. Peacock looking at Mr. Lion and asking “ really, even I programmed in COBOL are we that old ?” Mr. Lion blushed a little and just joined the light hearted moment. ?

Mr. Grizzly, smiling and thanking Mr. Owl said “ Now that Mr. Owl has made us all smile, let me share something to recover from this pleasant satire”

Grizzly signaled Ms. Swan and gave some instructions in sign language or it seemed like a coded sign between the two, and Ms. Swan brought the screen up with next slide

Image Credits: Microfocus

Mr. Koala said “Isn’t it remarkable”. He continued “ Though we appreciate the power and resiliency Mainframe brings to the table, we must also acknowledge and embrace the technological advances that are happening around us. We have always been at the forefront of technology adoption and that has kept us agile, competitive and profitable for such a long time. It is indeed the era of cloud tech and smartphones and API’s, and we should embrace them with a focus on how we can best leverage our existing assets and at the same time bring value to the table, rationalize costs and delight our customers. Thank you Mr. Grizzly for sharing this with us today. I understand this is just the beginning ”?

Mr. Grizzly replied

“ Thank you Mr. Koala for encouraging words, yes, we have just begun !”?

Swan’s email had following links?

Salesforce Tableau CRM and Einstein Discovery

COBOL API Integration

IBM Z Application and data access through APIs

Salesforce Tableau CRM and Einstein Discovery training?

Mainframe assets as REST resources

Disclaimer: Animal characters bears no resemblance to any person, role or industry. Characterization in above article is only to intrigue the reader.