September 26, 2017 | IBM Z

What’s the Real Value of JCL Reformatting Capabilities?

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What’s the Real Value of JCL Reformatting Capabilities?

When analyzing JCL management solutions, most organizations focus primarily on the value of eliminating the possibility of JCL-related production batch application failures. The other major feature is the JCL Standards Enforcement, again to minimize the possibility of production batch application failures caused by things like non-Production (and non-secured) DSN usage in a Production Job.

 

The ability to easily standardize the format of all Production JCL is often considered a tertiary feature that does not have the same level of benefit.  I believe that is because it is much easier to quantify the value of avoiding production batch application failures, and this is, frankly, the focus of the industry’s top JCL Management solutions such as JCLplus+ from Software Engineering of America (SEA).

 

The value of JCL (re)formatting capabilities, while not as easily quantifiable, can have a more significant positive impact on an organization than the other JCL Management tool features.  Can you believe that JCL (re)formatting can improve employee retention and enable large projects such as data center consolidations?

 

The hidden value of this seemingly ‘nice-to-have’ feature is in the following two areas:

 

Standardization as An Enabler In principle, standardization enables automation and productivity.  In the case of JCL, the value of standardization will likely present itself in different ways in different environments.  For businesses that do not have a quality JCL analysis tool such as XREFplus+DBr from SEA, you may need to use other scripting-based search capabilities to analyze JCL parameters.  Standardized JCL formatting enables positional-based scripting.

 

Of course, the value of teams being able to easily read and analyze JCL in a consistent format cannot be overlooked.

 

Pride of Ownership One of Deming’s 14 Points for the basis of industry transformation is ‘Permit pride of workmanship’.  It is human nature to live up to the standard of workmanship that surrounds them.  This is why athletic teams talk about ‘playing down to the level of their opponents’.  This is the basis for ‘dress for success’.  Technology workers who work in environments with subpar tools and ‘non-standard’ environments will begin to perform to match.  Permitting your technology teams to take ‘pride of ownership’ in their JCL starts with standardizing the look and feel of the JCL using a quality formatting tool like JCLplus+.

 

The time and effort needed to reformat JCL libraries (i.e. Jobs, PROCs, Include members) will pay dividends; even though those dividends won’t be easily quantified.