Prof. Appleby's Blog

I have decided to merge my old blog (profappleby.wordpress.com) into my newer blog.  I’ve carried across some of the old posts, including my recent foray into mainframes for project managers, and will bid farewell to the old blog at the end of this month.

The January 14th, 2010 edition of The Economist has an interesting article about mainframe computers.  The article is entitled Back in Fashion and provides some interesting insights into the status of mainframe technology and capabilities.

Back in Fashion

According to the article,

“IBM is also trying to attract new customers, particularly in fast-growing emerging markets. Without mainframes, India’s Housing Development Finance Corporation and the Bank of China in Hong Kong would have a hard time dealing with their explosive growth…”

The mainframe has evolved and adapted for many, many decades.  Today, it combines the same stable, robust, secure platform that large organizations have depended upon for half-a-century, while also providing a highly scalable, manageable, and affordable platform for the development of new workloads (Linux, Java, Websphere, DB2, Oracle, etc.).  And at a time when the benefits of virtualization are a dominant industry theme, the Z Series mainframe offers outstanding virtual capabilities.

A strong partnership with your key IT vendors can offer a genuine competitive advantage.  A vendor who wants to benefit from a long-term relationship with your company will take on the role of technical consultant.  When your vendor presents a proposal, use that opportunity to ask some important questions that will help you with planning and risk management.

The link below will take you to a presentation on this subject.  The twelve key questions are also listed below.

Vendor.Challenge

Twelve Important Question

1. Have you made any assumptions about our requirements that you would like to verify today?
2. What process did you follow to ensure that you understood and will be able to meet our requirements?
3. How have you validated that this design will meet our requirements?
4. Who else within our industry has taken this approach?
5. Are you aware of any quality problems with any of the components in this design?
6. Have all components and interfaces been tested together successfully?
7. Is there anything you would have liked to include in your design, but omitted due to price considerations?
8. As our system workload increases, what is the first resource we are likely to exhaust?
9. How will this system change the way we operate today?
10. What physical site preparations will this design require?
11. Are you of the opinion that we have the people resources needed to successfully complete this project?
12. What do you think will be our greatest challenge in implementing this system?

Continuing with our discussion of systems engineering, I would like to quote a small portion of the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook, Version 2.0, p.11, dated July 2000. This will give you a sense of both the technical nature of systems engineering and the wide variety of skill sets required within the field.

International Council on Systems Engineering
SE Handbook Working Group

“Systems engineering is an overarching discipline, providing the tradeoffs and integration between system elements to achieve the best overall product and/or service. Although there are some important aspects of project management in the Systems Engineering process, it is still much more of an engineering discipline than a management discipline. It is a very quantitative discipline, involving tradeoff, optimization, selection, and integration of the products of many engineering disciplines.”

“In its present (and still evolving) form, Systems Engineering combines elements of many disciplines such as operations research, system modeling and simulation, decision analysis, project management and control, requirements development, software engineering, specialty engineering, industrial engineering, specification writing, risk management, interpersonal relations, liaison engineering, operations analysis, and cost estimation.”

I have a real love for mathematics and, unexpectedly, I discovered that I enjoyed applying math to business problems.  This led to my taking numerous courses in operations research / management science, decision analysis, statistics and probability, mathematical models, and simulation.  Ultimately, this led to a career in systems engineering with IBM.

I would like for my blog to provide some value to young people who are considering careers in technology or careers in other disciplines that make use of technology.

Toward that end, I want to put some focus on the field of systems engineering.  We might begin with the basic question,

“What is systems engineering?”

A good starting place to learn about the field would be to visit this webpage of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE):

http://www.incose.org/practice/whatissystemseng.aspx

Then, for more detail, go to this INCOSE webpage:

http://www.incose.org/practice/fellowsconsensus.aspx

On the page above, Brian Mar offers the following as core concepts of systems engineering:

• Understand the whole problem before you try to solve it
• Translate the problem into measurable requirements
• Examine all feasible alternatives before selecting a solution
• Make sure you consider the total system life cycle. The birth to death concept extends to maintenance, replacement and decommission. If these are not considered in the other tasks, major life cycle costs can be ignored.
• Make sure to test the total system before delivering it.
• Document everything.

We’ll talk more about this soon.