Category Definitions

Large Enterprise IT Production

Think large banks, insurance companies, financial institutions, manufacturing, distribution, store retail, telecommunications, government services, airlines, hotels, etc. These are enterprises with millions of customers, billions of computer processed transactions involving many billions of dollars. Each need IT (Information Technology) support and services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year availability, reliability, serviceability, scalability, and security typically provided by IBM Z mainframe hardware, software, and an IT organization within the enterprise.

The job roles and responsibilities include significant separation of duties. As a result, each job role includes task that are typically well defined with senior technicians available to mentor new hires to become technically proficient.

These jobs include an expectation to learn the business over time to grasp the significant of a given job role within the larger context of supporting the business.

Consider the question, “What is Blue Cross / Blue Shield?”. Many might respond, “a health care organization”. Blue Cross / Blue Shield for a given state is a large IT organization processing related to health care insurance agreements and health care insurance claims.

Many of these large enterprises must operate using mandated regulations, policies, and procedures. A regulation of large IT organizations providing support and services to a large enterprise is a separation of duties and responsibilities. The regulation is a safeguard to mitigate risk. The separation of duties results in well defined specific job responsibilities and skills.

The good news is individual job responsibilities give full attention to a very specific IT job enabling the employee to get extremely skilled within the specific job responsibility. These jobs will have well defined job procedures and tasks completed by numerous technicians from entry level to highly experienced. These jobs at an entry level can be a great place to start a career. Many of these IT jobs can be mastered quickly because they are typically well defined tasks that entry level would learn from highly experienced technicians in the group.

The bad news is lack of exposure and understanding of the other IBM Z mainframe job responsibilities and skills. Once you become one of the highly experienced members of the group, it is best to develop leadership skills to mentor the early career hires while looking for another job role either within the many job roles in the company or outside the company.

A great advantage of learning IBM Z mainframe, the technology is a critical tool of business applied to wide variety industries. Your skill with the critical IBM Z mainframe business tool makes you valuable to many employers.

Medium or Small Enterprise IT Production

The medium and small enterprises will have smaller number of customers, smaller total revenue, and typically do not have the strict regulation requirements that are mandatory at most larger enterprises. As a result, the medium and small enterprise IT organizations combine job roles and responsibilities.

The good news is those with significant experience from medium and small enterprises typically have more diverse experience and awareness of all IBM Z mainframe technology after several years of on the job experience.

The bad news is the learning journey involving a variety of combined job roles and responsibilities will take longer to master. Also, the medium and small IT organizations are more likely to recruit those with experience from other IT organizations.

What all the enterprise IT production organizations have in common is collection, storage, and processing of data securely. What makes various industry enterprise IT production different is the volume of data, variety of data, regulations applied to the data, and speed at which the data must be processed.

The job roles and responsibilities include significant combination of duties discussed in the Large Enterprise IT Production. As a result, each job role includes tasks that are diverse with senior technicians available to mentor new hires to become technically proficient. Mastery of the combined job roles will take longer.

These jobs include an even higher expectation to learn the business over time to grasp the significant of a given job role within the larger context of supporting the business.

While mastering combination of job roles will take longer, the outcome is significant responsibility with higher compensation and personal value.

Examples of combined job roles include:

· Systems Programmer responsibilities for all System Administration, Performance and Capacity Planning, Systems and Solution Architect Consultation.

· Operations responsibilities for all Operations which potentially could include Systems Programming and Systems Administrator job responsibilities.

Independent Software Vendors and IBM

Independent Software Vendors, ISVs, provide software to production IT organizations necessary to run and support the Production IT business application services.

Enterprise IT may have software engineers titles, job roles and responsibilities. It is more likely Independent Software Vendor and Consulting/Integration organizations will have software engineer titles as a result of specific software product offerings and/or service/support offerings provided to enterprise IT organizations.

IBM provides the IBM Z mainframe hardware with support and services. IBM provides the IBM Z mainframe operating systems such as z/OS with support and services.

Production IT organizations will typically purchase software from ISVs. It is in the best interest of production IT organizations to purchase software which comes with on-going support, services, maintenance, and feature/function enhancements. In the long run it is far more cost effective for the company than writing and maintaining software in the majority of situations. Many production IT job responsibilities include installation, configuration, implementation, and production support for these ISV software products.

Production IT support personal have an immediate escalation support organization to contact when problems are encountered involving these ISV software products. The ISV support includes highly experienced technical personal that enables you to resolve problems with their products quickly while advancing your technical skills.

In addition to IBM providing the IBM Z mainframe, IBM provides hardware support and services, operating system support and services, and operating system software product support and services. Many production IT job responsibilities include installation, configuration, implementation, and production support for IBM Z hardware, operating systems, and software products.

Production IT support personnel have an immediate escalation support organization to contact when problems are encountered involving the IBM Z mainframe, operating systems, and software products. The IBM support organization include highly experienced technical personal that enables you to resolve problems with IBM products quickly while advancing your technical skills.

ISVs and IBM have excellent relationships. IBM and ISVs objective is to best serve the mutual customers that use the IBM Z mainframe. Additionally, offering customer choice is just good business for ISVs and IBM. Frequently, ISVs fill opportunity gaps with products, features, and functions not available in IBM software products.

The job roles and responsibilities are significantly different from Enterprise IT Production and Facility and Service Providers.

ISVs create, maintain, and support IBM Z mainframe software products used by Enterprise IT businesses.

The job roles are focused on software product creation, maintenance, support, product consulting, product marketing, and product sales.

The ISV job roles can be entry level and progress to high experience levels. The various job roles are determined by the needs to provide software products, support, and services need by Enterprise IT and the Facility and Service Providers.

An ISV Systems/Solution Architects would work closely with ISV marketing and sales associates to understand and article the needs of the Enterprise IT and Facility/Service Provides to provide product programming developers tasks to build, maintain, advance, and support the ISV software product portfolio.

Experienced ISV product developers and ISV product support personnel need to possess technical skills and proficiency with parts for the IBM Z mainframe operating system, system programming, and systems administration technical responsibilities in order to support the ISV software product within the Enterprise IT or Facility/Service Provider organizations. Experienced ISV associates enable technical growth of Enterprise IT or Facility/Service Provider as a result of the ISV technical support.

IBM has many thousands of employees responsible for design, build, and support of the IBM Z mainframe hardware, operating systems, and software products used by Enterprise IT or Facility/Service Providers. IBM, like the ISVs, have highly specialized job responsibilities focused on hardware, specific components of the operating systems, and software products.

Like the ISVs, IBM marketing, sales, architects, and consultants work closely with each other and their assigned Enterprise IT or Facility/Service Provider organizations requiring them to have awareness of the various Enterprise IT or Facility/Service Provider job responsibilities to best help Enterprise IT or Facility/Service Provider support their tasks and advancing their technology.

Consulting and System Integration

Development, maintenance, enhancement, and modernizing large scale end-to-end business application services requires deep industry specific knowledge accompanied by knowledge and awareness of IT hardware and software to be proposed and implemented by various IT departments.

While IBM Z mainframe hardware and software are critical, end-to-end business solutions involve technology external to the IBM mainframe such as networks, Point of Sale (POS) devices, Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) devices, cell phones, internet browsers, and wide variety of emerging technology devices known as Internet of Things (IOT).

Consulting and System Integration organizations are frequently retained by large enterprise production IT Management, and senior technical staff members to assist with development, maintenance, enhancement, and modernizing large scale end-to-end business application services specific to their industry.

An internet search ‘business consulting and system integration’ provides insight into this job category. These organizations need business oriented thinking staff with technology specific skills such as IBM Z mainframe technology.

These job roles are primarily business and industry focused but require a much better than average knowledge and awareness of the distinctive strengths of varies hardware and software technology to propose solutions.

The IBM Z mainframe is playing a significantly bigger role in the large scale business solutions today and will be playing a bigger role in the future as a result of the ‘holy grail’ of IT business application processing – prescriptive analytics at time of transaction. Recent technology advancements in IBM Z mainframe hardware and software opened the door for development and implementation of prescriptive analytics and time of transaction. A set of ‘Data Science’ job roles exist and will grow as a result.

An internet search ‘prescriptive analytics’ provides insight into this job category. While IBM and ISVs provide software to help implement prescriptive analytics, the purchase of software follows a developed business solution plan by the production IT organization typically with the assistance of System Integration Consultants.

Consulting and System Integration focus is on industry targeted Enterprise IT organizations with the intention to assist the organization decision making involved with design/plan for new business services and modernization of existing business services. These job roles need a surface level awareness of the business organization, various technical roles, responsibilities, and skills to accomplish their mission as trusted advisories to the Enterprise IT executives, management, and senior level technicians to make good technology decisions.

Internet search ‘Business Consulting and System Integration’ to gain insights about this IBM Z mainframe ecosystem category. You will find many of the well know business consulting organizations that are well known by enterprise executives.

While this is a separate IBM Z mainframe ecosystem category, it is common for Enterprise IT and Facility/Service Providers to engage with IBM, ISVs, and the Business Consulting and System Integration organizations to evaluate various design/plan options to technology advance and grow the Enterprise IT and Facility/Service Providers.

Facility and Service Providers

Large, medium and small enterprise businesses along with government entities exist to products and services. The company executives may decide their primary mission may not be IT and might negotiate with a Facilities and Service Provider to use their Data Center

An enterprise IT organization is mandatory to provide enterprise business services. It is possible for the enterprise to pay a different company to provide IBM Z mainframe data center facilities hardware, software, network, technical support and services, commonly known as Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS.

The Facilities and Service Providers job roles are highly focused on the hardware, software, and network technology. The business organization may choose to focus exclusively the on the business and business services.

Contracting with a Facility and Service Provider requires the enterprise to have staff that is technically proficient to supervisor the day-to-day IT services in addition to details involving performance, capacity, service level agreements, variable costs of services, risk mitigation, oversight of data security, requirements for new features and functions.

Facility and Service Providers technical job roles are very similar to those of the Enterprise IT Production organizations. The difference separation from knowledge of the business. Another difference is Facility and Service Provider technicians skills and tasks are frequently applied to many different Enterprise IT Production organizations.