See a PDF of the results of our 2007 Shop Profile Survey. (13 MB file)

Earlier this year, more than 630 System i professionals answered a web-based survey (co-sponsored by System iNetwork and Databorough) about their shops. They shared information about demographics, resources, key initiatives, application usages, and challenges. Ninety-seven percent of the respondents use the System i for significant software development, including coding, modification, and maintenance. We thank the respondents for showing us around their workplace. The results paint a vivid picture of the current state of System i shops.

Demographics

The best place to start is always at the beginning, which in this case reveals that 86 percent of the respondents work for a company that uses the AS/400, iSeries, or i5. Seven percent work for a System i software vendor, 5 percent work at a consultancy, and only 1 percent work for IBM. Of those companies, a quarter are in the manufacturing (other than computing) industry. Wholesale, retail trade; finance, insurance, and real estate; and computer and DP services account for about 15 percent each. The remainder fall into public administration, government, education, medical and legal services, and the ever-present "other" industry.

Most of the respondents work in public corporations (37 percent — Fortune 1000 corporations account for 15 percent), privately held, family owned and operated businesses (24 percent), or privately held, sole proprietorship (17 percent). Government and other not-for-profit organizations make up the bulk of the remainder.

In what will probably come as no surprise to most of you, there has been little recent entry into the System i market. Nearly half of the shops have used the System i (in its many forms) for more than 20 years. An additional 40 percent have used the platform for 11 to 20 years. Only two shops told us that they started using a System i in the past two years.

Data center locations. Most of the respondents are located in the United States (the top areas outside the U.S. are Europe with 11 percent and Canada with 5 percent). In the U.S., 31 percent of System i shops are located in the Midwest, 22 percent in the East, 15 percent in the South, and 13 percent in the West. Nearly six out of every 10 shops have only one data center, and the locations of the data centers greatly mirror the locations of the company headquarters. In fact, the numbers are nearly identical.

Titles. What's in a name? When asked what job title the leader of your IT, MIS, or DP department has, IT shops with one to 50 employees split their responses evenly among vice president, chief information officer (CIO), director, and manager. When IT shop size topped 50, vice president and CIO are used much more frequently.

Nearly 60 percent of the people who responded to our survey were either senior developer/systems analysts (42 percent) or IT managers.

Working conditions. Most System i professionals work 40 to 50 hours a week, while about 20 percent are split between fewer than 40 and more than 50. The majority of System i professionals work in either a cubicle or an office. Cubicle workers slightly outnumber office workers 49 percent to 44 percent. Only 4 percent telecommute.

Regardless of where System i professionals are working, most of you are moderately stressed (60 percent). A lucky 19 percent experience very little job-related stress, while 17 percent reported very high job-related stress.

How Does Your Staff Grow?

When we asked about IT staff size, we created four buckets for responses: one to five employees, six to 20, 21 to 50, and more than 50. Shops were evenly balanced over all categories, although six to 20 led the pack with almost a third of the responses. However, even given the similar numbers between the small, medium, and large IT shops, the IT staff assigned to work on System i was typically five or fewer. More than half of the shops have five or fewer System i staff engaged in application design, programming, modification, and/or maintenance. Almost two-thirds of the IT staffs have five or fewer System i staff who are RPG and/or Cobol developers. Eighty percent of IT shops have five or fewer System i technical staff engaged in networking, system administration, operations, and/or security.

New hires. Forty percent of shops added an additional System i professional in the past year (not just a replacement). Of those hired, half were brought on board primarily for RPG or Cobol coding. One-fifth of the new employees were hired directly from a college or technical school. Not surprisingly, there isn't a lot of formal training going on, and 84 percent of entry-level employees were informally trained on the job by existing staff. One respondent (speaking for many) stated that there are "not enough people in IT to do all that needs to be done with the hardware, and there is a lack of training for all staff."

Train existing staff. One shop told us that "in [its] small shop, it's a challenge to find time to explore new technologies while still providing support to users." It can be a challenge to acquire the skills you need to effectively use all the new and exciting technologies. The good news is that 30 percent of System i professionals get plenty of training, education, and on-the-job opportunities to learn and practice new skills. An additional 40 percent learn everything on the job. The bad news — you knew it was coming — is that 30 percent of the professionals who learn new skills get rusty because they have little or no chance to ever use these new skills. And really, why learn skills if you don't get to practice them? One survey taker stated that the biggest challenge is "learning new skills on my own. If I learn and don't have a use for them, what's the point? I could use some Java knowledge for development, but it would only be used for 1 percent of our needs."

Many options are available to help shoulder the load during those times when the workload is too great for current resources. Most System i shops contract programmers or system administrators at least occasionally. Other popular options include engaging professional service companies for new development work and using "mentors" or advisory consultants to help guide a development team. The least used options were outsourcing development services and data centers.

Open to new ideas. Change does not come swiftly in the System i world. Two-thirds of you view your bosses and System i colleagues as generally open to new ideas but acknowledge that they wish to change slowly. A little less than one-third view your bosses and colleagues as very enthusiastic about implementing the latest technologies. How these outlooks on new technologies translate into real-world situations will become clear later when we examine modernization efforts.

Key Initiatives

One of the few certainties in business is government regulation, which always drives initiatives, and the System i world is no exception. The government regulations that affect the most shops are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Sarbanes-Oxley (the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act).

Even though change may come slowly, things are always changing. Each shop always seems to be in the middle of some initiative. The initiatives that most shops are planning, in the midst of, or have completed are securing systems from data security threats; ensuring privacy, security, and audit legislation compliance; offering web services; and modernizing current enterprise systems with GUIs and enhanced integration and workflow capabilities for internal users (Figure 1).

More good news for most is that, for now, the initiative used by the fewest number of shops is outsourcing some IT functions and/or using application service providers. One respondent said that "as a small company in a very competitive industry, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to justify the cost of System i software. We probably will be relying more on outsourcing for things such as payroll and EDI." In the meantime, most shops are not looking to outsource System i operations.

Other initiatives on the bottom of the importance scale for most shops are implementing supply chain mandates (e.g., EDI-INT, GDSN, RFID), pursuing open-source software initiatives, and replacing obsolete core systems with new software vendor packages.

Modernization

IBM has a modernization and development strategy for its customers, and 40 percent of you think that IBM's modernization strategy is generally clear and specific, while only 4 percent of you think that IBM's modernization strategy is very clear and specific. One out of four System i professionals do not know that IBM has such a strategy.

It's easy to see how someone can be unaware of IBM's strategy. With all the time it takes to learn new skills, train employees, and complete daily tasks, you can easily lose track of Big Blue's plans. However, the statistics are the same when it comes to individual shop strategies for modernization. Twenty percent told us that their companies lack a modernization and development strategy.

With the lack of clearly defined and communicated modernization plans, it should come as no surprise that half of the shops haven't started to act on modernization. Or, if you're a glass-half-full person, half of the System i shops have started down the path to modernization, with 11 percent having finished a significant module or application. Some of you would like to finish a module but have found it hard to "pick the right tool to modernize [your] applications."

Factors other than strategies are also slowing the modernization process. Eighty percent of System i shops have more than 500,000 lines of legacy RPG and/or Cobol code. It takes a long time to convert all of that code, especially when two-thirds of System i shops have five or fewer employees who are RPG and/or Cobol developers. Many respondents want to modernize but are being held back by a "small staff, tight budget, and being mired in maintaining old code."

Another barrier to rapid modernization is the lack of documentation. Fifty percent of System i shops have undocumented data models or business logic for legacy applications. On the other hand, 30 percent have both documented. One shop is trying to "continue to move forward with some sense of urgency." Change will come; it will just come slowly, a pace that fits most System i professionals just fine.

Development

Even though most System i IT staffs are small, they sure crank out the applications. Over half of the shops keep most development in-house. Only 2 percent contract out application development. A quarter rely on packaged software for the majority of applications (with some customization and maintenance, of course), while 16 percent enjoy a balance of in-house development, software packages, and/or contract software. Additionally, most shops have customized or homegrown legacy applications. System i shops certainly don't have a work shortage! For a more complete picture of System i development, read "A Portrait of iSeries Development" (February 2006, article ID 20405 at SystemiNetwork.com).

What Are You Running on Your System i?

RPG and CL rule over all other programming languages that are used substantially for new software development. ILE RPG is used substantially by 75 percent of all shops, while CL is used substantially by 65 percent. Following behind the two leaders are SQL, HTML and JavaScript, RPG III, and Java ( Figure 2).

Following the built-in DB2 UDB for i5/OS, the most used database is Microsoft SQL Server, which is found in two-thirds of your shops. The only other database used in over 20 percent of System i shops is Oracle.

Figure 3 shows what's running on most AS/400, iSeries, and/or i5 systems. Leading the pack, and running on more than half of all systems, are financial and human resource applications. In a virtual tie for second through fourth are web servers, ERP applications, and web application servers.

Biggest Challenges

The last question we asked was an open-ended call for venting: What is the biggest challenge your shop faces? One shop was lucky and responded with an emphatic "none." No word on whether they are hiring. A few shops said that their biggest problem was with users, one going so far as to insinuate that perhaps their users were not overly intelligent.

Many shops struggle to "keep the legacy code working with new requirements and trying to sort out which 'new' technologies and buzz words are really new and what is just a new word for an old technique." One respondent noted that the "proliferation of servers (rather than consolidation) is leading to higher energy consumption. IBM has missed the boat on this; [we] now see heavy Dell advertising for server consolidation strategies."

Another shop does not want to modernize, and they are tired of being told that they need to. "We're a very small company, we like green screen, and we don't need to be told by IBM that we're nothing without GUI. So, on new hardware, don't make us pay more for 5250 capability, and don't employ governors to limit processing capabilities. We would be willing to upgrade if [IBM] would listen to us instead of telling us what they think we need. Twenty-five years ago I felt like IBM cared about the customer and our needs — today I feel that IBM cares about only IBM."

One respondent wants to "modernize the interface without spending years doing it. IBM needs to give us something besides HATS and WebFacing. Give us something that scales and is as functionally rich as the tools that we are used to using." Sometimes there is a "lack of direction. There is no clear-cut direction management wants to take. Projects are ad hoc and sometimes rushed." One shop told us that "management does not like the System i platform because it's not GUI. [Management's] goal is to move everything to either Windows or Unix."

They aren't alone. Other shops are struggling to sell the System i to their company's management. Their biggest challenge is "not knowing what IBM will do, especially with its spastic (or lack of) marketing in the System i world." Like many of you, numerous respondents are struggling to overcome a "lack of customer knowledge about System i and a lack of IBM broad, common advertising to the customer base." Many System i shops face the challenge of integrating the System i with Windows applications and interfacing the system with other non-System i systems.

Many shops told us that they are having trouble finding (and keeping) talented professionals. Along with this, they are struggling to keep up with changing technology and finding a way to be proactive about challenges. One shop "ends up being reactive to business requirements and not reacting fast enough." How do you find the balance between constantly jumping to new technologies and not getting left behind by an ever-changing environment? And how do you find the right people to help? As always, those are easier questions to ask than to answer.

The Future Is Bright

Many of you are fighting to keep the System i in your shops, and you will be glad to hear that the battle is going well. Eighty-five percent of System i shops have no plans to move away from the System i (essentially unchanged since the application development survey in September 2005), although they may move some business functionality to other platforms. Only 3 percent are planning to migrate all applications off the System i to Windows, Linux, or other Unix systems. Where is the System i going in the future? The answer appears to be nowhere. It's staying right here. As always.

Jesse West is an associate editor for System iNEWS.