When it comes to truisms in my family the ones that stand out include never making our bed when we are tired, never cooking when we are hungry and never buying a car when we need one. Clearly, performing any of these tasks when not necessary has proven the more beneficial as well as being the least taxing on our sleep patterns, our waistlines or our pockets.
For CIOs, particularly those who embrace NonStop systems in support of mission critical applications, some other truisms apply. Never upgrade your system when it’s so “old and tired” that there are few specialists left in the data center who know anything about it; never try throwing all your application “ingredients” together under a new services paradigm when new SLAs have just been negotiated; and never start looking at security when it becomes clear you have to! Sounds simple enough, but today when so much is in transition and when there’s so much external pressure to embrace more modern solutions, the temptation to do all of the above may prove hard to resist.
Awareness that change is needed is just one byproduct of using big data analytics – highly skilled data scientists within your enterprise will recognize the symptoms long before CIOs initiate any knee-jerk responses. However, when it comes to the NonStop user community, are commitments being made to ensure these data scientists are well-educated about NonStop? In the post of Jan 5, 2015, to this blog, A Solution for the Data Scientist Shortage of 2015 it was noted that, “As more companies explore the potential of big data analytics for competitive advantage, operational intelligence, risk management, customer experience, and marketing opportunities, the demand for skilled engineers is compounding at an alarming rate.”
Challenges to Maintaining a Competitive Advantage for NonStop Users
Perhaps more daunting for the NonStop user community, even when investments in data scientists familiar with NonStop have been made, the recent note from McKinsey (according to CNBC: Big data’s big stumbling block) that asks, “What if number crunchers aren’t enough? After all, if a great insight derived from advanced analytics is too complicated to understand, business managers just won’t use it.” And herein lies an important issue for everyone in the NonStop community. As a group, NonStop users are slow to adopt new technologies – the nature of the applications running on NonStop often deters CIOs from making changes – so what if the business owners of solutions on other platforms become better informed about their clients changing usage patterns long before anyone responsible for NonStop has picked up on a developing trend?
This is precisely why WebAction is including NonStop systems in their solution – simple to build and deploy Data Driven Applications. It lessens the need for the data scientists even as it makes it a lot easier to communicate to management exactly what is going on. Even with the visible reluctance by CIO’s to mess with their NonStop systems, the non-intrusive nature of WebAction makes adoption rather painless. And this will prove to be an action they will not lose sleep over!
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