i Advocates, Unite!

In November, we wrote about our first iAdvocate Tutorial session. We’ve just finished our spring 2013 RPG & DB2 Summit, which contained our second iAdvocate session.

As with the one in October, the iAdvocate session was a hit. We were better prepared this time with more chairs in the room - good thing, since most of them were full! We even had some of the members of the local Atlanta IBM i users group (recently renamed from AMCU to iTAC) stop by to join in the conversation.

There were again many good points made. Someone asked where the younger developers for this platform are. We’ve asked that question a few times as well and explored a few potential answers. Of course, a look around the room showed that a larger than usual number of younger developers were present at the Summit this time. One of those spoke up and said that his shop has around 30 IBM i developers under the age of 30.

So we’re making progress! If that shop can do it, so can others. Mike led a discussion about investing in creating your own IBM i developers - trained in your own philosophy and practices. As Mike said “Give somebody a break . . . Start mentoring someone new.”

Aaron Bartell reminded us that if we want to attract younger developers, we need to make sure we’re doing modern things in our shops. “If I walked into a shop where people are still on V5R3, using columnar RPG and not using RDP for editing, I’d keep walking.” Well said, Aaron!

There was even more lively discussion on what Mike calls the “positive feedback loop” - singing the praises of our platform within the shop. Sometimes our system and its reliability and capability are taken for granted because no one ever hears about it. It sits there quietly running our core business applications smoothly and efficiently. But too often when it comes to some new whiz-bang BI or Web or mobile application, IBM i is not the first platform that comes to mind as the host - perhaps it’s not considered at all.

Mike gave many concrete suggestions on how to change that. One is to demonstrate that you care about the business and that you (and i) can help by scheduling time with a company business executive and asking him or her “What keeps you up at night?” Then go away and think about what you (and i) may be able to do to help alleviate the biggest concerns of the executives in your shop.

Get in a position to lead rather than wait for someone to come and ask you for something - because they may not ask you for it; they may ask someone else. And that’s how these other (inferior) platforms work their way into IBM i shops.

In this discussion, one of our favorite suggestions was that we put up a sign in each IBM i shop - similar to the safety signs that sometimes appear on factory floors - “NN days without an accident” - that says “IBM i has gone NNNN days with no unscheduled downtime.” Of course, we’ll need to allow for a much larger number of digits than most of those similar signs!

Mike challenged us to change the discussion - don’t ask Why i? - rather ask “Why not i?”

You can see the slides that Mike used to lead the iAdvocate discussion as well as many other resources, such as case studies and independent research papers on our iAdvocate page.

iAdvocate Advocating

Greetings from a grey day in Paris. We had been hoping to visit the Louvre today, but it turns out that Tuesday (the only day off we have here on this trip) is the one day per week it is closed. So instead we're writing this blog. Not a good trade-off in our opinion but perhaps it makes you feel better about not being in Paris!

Our blog on advocating for the IBM i drew quite a few comments and while we have responded to some in the blog, not everyone goes back and reads the comments so we thought we'd briefly revisit the topic today.

Tim commented that: "I think Jon you need to spend some time out here in the real world, on a daily basis, dealing with real CIO's that are continually degrading the IBM i as "Old Technology". We do indeed work with many clients where there are CIOs and other senior executives that feel exactly the same the same as the ones he describes. In such cases we do our best to help the IBM i proponents in the organization fight the misconceptions and demonstrate the value of IBM i." 

Tim also noted, "... and they think IBM has given up on the IBM i, and I alone can't fight this anymore, need some support from IBM directly. ..." That really is the point we were trying to make. As individuals we can't--that's why we need to work together. IBM is helping in many ways. When it comes to dispelling the notion that IBM has "given up," how much more definitive can you get than the statements from IBM Power Systems GM Colin Parris in the "IBM i Strategy and Roadmap"? His personal introduction concludes with this statement:

"You will find that our commitment to our IBM i clients, ISVs and business partners is solid and unchanged. We continue to make substantial investments in the future of IBM i as an important, strategic element in our IBM systems portfolio." 

That document also references the fact that more than 150,000 companies are using the platform. That's companies--not boxes. The number of boxes (and therefore licenses of the OS) is indeed shrinking. One of our clients is responsible for some 20-plus of that reduction. They went from more than 25 systems to five by consolidating their workloads on ever more powerful servers.

In his keynote presentation at the Summit, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will also referenced the white paper and a number of other studies that demonstrate not only that IBM i is the TCO (total cost of ownership) leader, but it can also be a TCA (total cost of acquisition) leader. This is an issue that Paul raised in his comment. You can find Steve's presentation here (look at the 2nd chart on P4 for TCA figures). We're working on gathering more material of this type together and will let you know as soon as it is available.

In the meantime we'll leave you with part of a comment from Yvonne E. who noted: "While I do agree the frustration is valid how does that help the topic at hand?" We couldn't agree more. Our careers are based on IBM i. Advocating for the platform makes perfect sense if we want to continue to be gainfully employed and not have to go over to the dark side.

It would be wonderful if IBM were to suddenly agree with all of us that the IBM i platform deserves to be singled out as the best business application platform. But even if Big Blue did so tomorrow, it wouldn't dissuade us from advocating for the platform ourselves and encouraging everyone else to do the same. We can't control what IBM does or doesn't do, we can only control what we do. And we choose to advocate for i.