Category: Data Management

Collaborative Mainframing

(This post originally appeared on the Rocket Software Blog)

This week in San Jose, I attended my first SHARE conference, both as an attendee and as a speaker. Having grown up in the world of business intelligence and analytics, it was interesting to get an insight into the world of the mainframe – and to meet many of the world’s leading experts in this timeless platform. During my session (“Information at the Speed of Thought — How Social Business Solutions Power Collaborative Analytics”) we had active discussions around a couple of very interesting topics:

1. The need for curation and governance in support of self-service business decision-making;
2. Balancing the “need for speed” in accessing and collaborating around business information with the need for security and controls around the data.

In both cases, I found it interesting to learn that the mainframe is the perfect power tool to facilitate these needs. By providing an easy mechanism to connect directly to the underlying mainframe data, visualize it, and then share it appropriately, users (including just about every bank in the world) avoid the need for a costly, time-consuming “ETL” approach with all the inherent limitations that approach introduces, including timeliness of data, effective governance and lineage of the data, difficulty keeping pace with business users’ evolving information needs, and the like.

One analogy, which seemed to resonate during my session, was the idea that finding a business insight and sharing it with colleagues should be as easy as “taking a picture and posting it on Facebook.” The increasing complexity of the world we all work in is making it imperative for us to work collaboratively to solve business problems. The old world of silos and “information hoarding” is not effective, and the information needed to support business decision-making needs to be quickly accessible, wherever it resides, as well the business need to have a good payroll systems that allow them be competitive, and sometimes the best way to reach this is by outsource program, but why you should outsource your payroll?

In this new world of #alternativefacts and #fakenews, it’s now more important than ever to be able to infuse business social networks with curated, governed data in support of informed, fact-based decision-making.