System iNetwork

November 2004

November 24, 2004 7:29 AM

Don't forget the loyal customers!

I read Carson's last soap box column on the state of applications with great interest. I agree with a lot of his points. Companies selling comerical software have to compete with products on other platforms that "look good". We all know that it often doesn't matter if a GUI is more effective than a text based app, but if it sells, hey great! But Carson's point on the high cost of interactive strikes close to my heart and to many loyal IBM customers that still provide green-screen apps because THEY WORK BETTER than any browser based or client server app. Many of us aren't try to deliver commerical software, what we are trying to do is make and save our companies money by providing the most efficient applications. IBM is killing off their own loyal base of customers with their high cost of interactive processing. IBM, stop it! Quit trying to hide the cost between standard & enterprise editions. It is what it is ... an interactive tax. Lock us in to this platform forever by letting us to continue to offer cost effective and efficient applications.

Posted by on November 24, 2004 at 7:29 AM | Comments (42)

November 21, 2004 11:37 AM

Training

Training is an ongoing issue and one that I have always been interested in. I am largely self-taught on the iSeries and have used different products and techniques over the years, although one of the main methods used has been the hard one of working it out for myself from the manuals – although I should say that iSeries News often provides a good insight into particular topics.

With the rapid advances in technology we are now faced with, there appears to be more to learn at an ever increasing rate and I find it is getting increasingly difficult to keep up – although some of my colleagues may say this is just my age showing!

In my early days when the System/38 was some hot new technology, it was possible for a single person to get to know a lot about the machine. If you could program in RPG3 and CL, knew how to create display files, could use SEU, SDA and Query, plus a little knowledge of work management issues, you had a good grasp of the machine and its capabilities.

Now, many may still use these technologies (all those legacy systems that have yet to be converted/rewritten/replaced) and we have in addition:
RPGIV - which has far more to it than RPG3 ever did, and is still growing
CLLE – some new functions have at last been added
The ILE environment – service programs, activation groups and so on
SQL - both interactive and imbedded in the code
3rd part query and reporting tools
The Eclipse development environment
Writing Web applications – both the coding techniques and HTML, CSS, Javascript.
Java
Configuring web servers
TCP/IP and connectivity

and so on. But we are also expected to be competent in using software that hardly existed in S/38 days, such as word processors, spreadsheets, presentation graphics (my first presentation was a S/38 text file printed by a line printer on plain paper then photocopied to transparency foils!) - these being just incidental, but necessary, to the job we have to do.

Then there are very few roles as just a programmer or coder. Most jobs require a knowledge of business processes, on top of which there are new, important regulatory issues to contend with.

I have mostly worked for smaller companies where budgets are an issue. In the early days, a course lasting a week could be had for less than the cost of a VDU screen so it looked reasonable in price. Now a single day's course can cost more than a low-end PC and so looks more significant.

So I am interested in your experiences. How do you keep up? Do you get time/money courses from your employer? Or is the view 'It is my career, it is up to me to train for it' the one that you see. How do you train and what budget do you have? Do you make use of free resources such as those on the Internet, buy books, subscribe to magazines?

I would be interested to hear.

Posted by on November 21, 2004 at 11:37 AM