The Impact of the Aging RPG Talent Pool

 

Some concerning numbers emerged from a recent LinkedIn poll on the age of IBM i managers and technicians, confirming suspicions many have had about the pool of RPG technicians. Interesting comments and proposed solutions were made by many poll participants.

 

First, the numbers: 664 people responded to the poll in the LinkedIn group, AS/400 Specialists, though it was linked to from other groups as well. The poll ran in the fourth quarter of 2011 and asked the simple question, how old are you? Here are the results:

 

 

At 45 percent, nearly half are at the age of 51 or over. Gender-wise, women represented 20 percent of respondents overall, but they had a 30 percent share of the 51 and over groups, and an 18 percent share of 50 or under. The pool also included non-RPG experts on IBM i, which makes the actual RPG developer numbers even lower.

 

Thoughts and Feelings for the IBM Midrange Systems

In the various LinkedIn groups where the poll was posted, 200 plus people also took the time to write their thoughts and feelings about everything from the S/3 to the IBM i. The comments showed a broad and deep affection for the systems. Reading the comments, one can't help but a get a sense of people feeling like they had belonged to an important subculture of the last four decades that formed around the dominant computer innovator and provider
for the much of the period. These feelings seemed to originate from two sources, with many people mentioning both:

 

Secure and professional livelihood – many people expressed gratitude about the opportunity the IBM systems
gave them to earn a good living and support themselves and their families in a respected, professional occupation.

 

Sense of accomplishment and making a contribution – many people also expressed the feeling that because of
the superior quality of the IBM systems they were able to make significant contributions to the businesses of their companies, enabling them to play an important role in support of business operations and initiatives.

 

Protect Yourself From the RPG Brain Drain

Typical AS/400 applications represent past investments, and replacement costs, of millions of dollars.

Whether embedded in the application, or in the minds of retiring employees, application knowledge is an enterprise asset that needs to be both fully protected and fully utilized.

 

Much of the ability to utilize that investment lies in the talents and experience of people who may be retiring, or otherwise leaving, in the not too distant future. How can businesses protect and utilize their investments?

 

A Four Point Plan

Here are four compelling, common sense things IBM i IT managers should be doing:

 

The Four Point Plan Explained

 

Stop the isolation of IBM i applications – spread the knowledge with readable application

documentation. As experienced people leave, and as businesses add other, "modern", systems,

legacy AS/400 applications increasingly become regarded as obscure, esoteric and unknowable.

 

For many companies, however, these legacy applications contain critical business rules and data

data – but the enterprise knowledge of them dwindles with each passing year. IT managers need to educate and communicate application knowledge to their new staff, outsourced resources, users and management to preserve and protect this valuable corporate asset.

 

Manage your Business Rules: One of the most valuable aspects of your legacy asset is the codification of business rules that control thousands of processes in your company. Do you know where they are? Do you know if they are consistent? Can you tell anyone what they are? Leading IT management consultants such Gartner Group and IBM place great value on the investment that companies have made in developing their business rules.

 

Analysis of representative RPG applications performed by Databorough have shown there are approximately 30 business rules per thousand lines of RPG code. Using this figure you can

approximate how many business rules are in your applications. Are you proactively in charge of this asset?

 

Make your development plans and decisions quantifiable and fact-driven: Even your most experienced developers, should plan your legacy application projects estimates based on documented, quantifiable information about your legacy application code and design? Do you account for the varying levels of complexity in your existing system when planning design, programming and testing? How much subjectivity is in your process? How many metrics?

 

Recover and reuse proven application designs: Over many years of ongoing development and maintenance, application structure naturally erodes to the point where it is no longer optimally designed. In most AS/400 shops, there is no explicit application design documented anywhere - it is implicit in the code. The business rules, data model, complexity metrics and architecture of your legacy application is your own management process designed around documented, quantifiable metrics?

 

Databorough's X-Analysis product has been used by thousands of companies around the world for 25 years to protect and increase the value of legacy applications by exposing their contents, business rules, data models, architecture and metrics. Important to this capability is the accessibility and communication of this information to less technical people, such as analysts and managers.

 

The LinkedIn poll can be found here. You may need to belong to the AS/400 Specialists group to view it.