Think Forward and Differently

Following Your Muse and Making a Difference

Several years ago, I began moving more into management roles. Feeling like this was a positive and new area to take my ability I continually went forward and dived in. Moving more into management and later into director level roles my work became more focused on many different technologies and platforms, serving the businesses that worked for, and keeping the budget in line while keeping the entire technology paradigm working to excellence and adapting to business requirements and conditions.

Management, especially being an excellent manager, is a very hard job and a challenge every day.  There are lots of managers, but few that really wear this hat well. Even though I was managing teams of different sizes, skills, and areas of expertise, I tried, sometimes to my error, keeping my hands and eyes in the code.  I just love to code and develop things that make work better for others. If you are familiar with my LinkedIn feeds my content of interest has been shaped into a mix of work culture and technology as a business tool.

If I have learned one thing as a leader, manager, and director it is to do your best to ensure that your team has what it needs to do their best work every day. There is a lot to unpack here, but that is for future articles. Being in IT leadership it also brings a bigger scope of understanding to this mantra of mine in collaborating cross departmentally with other leaders, managers, and individuals to have the infrastructure and services available to allow them to work and be excellent.  The biggest difference that can possibly be made for a leader is to add that secret ingredient that grows excellence in others.

At this point in my career, I am following my muse. It is still code and data, but after the experiences of the last ten plus years outside of the code editor as a full time manager/director, I see things completely differently in the entire IT scope and how technology can influence and empower a business into a powerful enterprise and how it can at the same time be a gutted and frustrating business unit that does more to hinder growth than it enables. Tough words but it is the truth.

Thinking Differently

I am planning to post this initially to the ILE – RPG Developers group in LinkedIn. It really does not matter if it is for the IBMi platform or any other fully developed and business ready development or business platform, the grind and churn of working to develop computerized services and software applications is forcing innovation at an astonishing rate.

Twenty or thirty years ago when the major computing power was found in mainframe, midrange, and the early server-based platforms while (at the time) weak and buggy PC platforms were isolated, rarely networked, and not the focus of development. There were major innovations that began pushing the paradigm and changing the way computers fit into the enterprise and into our homes. America Online, Netscape, and desktop applications like Office began carving out a different world and development began crossing outside of the mainframe/midrange world and the new world of servers, databases, programming languages, and technologies started the journey to were we see the technology world we see today. New terms such as deprecated, serverless, cloud computing, and the alphabet soup of acronyms to help define technologies and keep assemblance of this fascinating and complex world of technology and data appeared and have taken over.

Think about the word deprecated for a minute and then read on.

Think Forward

There was a point in my career where I moved completely to a new world of not having an IBMi, not having RPG, and not having the ability to freely code something. My new world was with a Microsoft Server based ERP solution running over a massive Oracle DBMS system. There was no source code to the ERP, it was proprietary, and complex. The licensing of the ERP system had many statutes to disincentivize developing, changing, or fill in the blank. The one thing I did have was SQL. So, I used it.

Outside of the IBMi world SQL is it. This unlocked my mind to the power of SQL and how it is the language of data and database systems. I had to change my thinking and most importantly think forward. I could not read the code, alter anything, and my hands were tied. All my twenty-plus years of experience was gone. My SQL was lackluster and deadlocked in how I was using it in the IBMi world. I had to change to survive. My position was a working manager of a fast-moving supplier in the automotive industry and solutions require fast work and exact results. I had no other position but to think forward. Think forward because the past is gone.

This opened a new world for me, and I made SQL my development tool of choice. The environments I was working in were Oracle DBMS, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL. This enterprise had many mission-critical manufacturing and distribution solutions based off of and integrated with the MS Server-based ERP.

Thinking forward, I was able over five years to develop additional mission critical applications using SQL as the core tool of choice along with PHP and .Net (C#) that made a real time manufacturing monitoring system for a huge facility running state of the art manufacturing systems, recursive analysis tools for supply chain management, workflow and management tools for secondary operations in the engineering sphere, and a data warehouse system pulling from many different data technologies into a singular view of the business. 

Stuff to think about

Looking back while thinking forward, there are some pivotable things that can help bring new experiences and new creative solutions into the IBMi world. I will be embarking on a new journey soon with a new company and returning to the code and data system that has more potential than any platform I have been on. These have been on mind and in my work in the past few years and can be big deep areas to write about and develop in.

Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is huge. If you are an IBMi  developer this is some green grass on the other side of the fence that may really interests you. It is not a new term but is really taking shape in the enterprise world and I describe it as ERP systems on steroids. Coming from a manufacturing and distribution world, the ERP is often associated with other systems such as MES (manufacturing execution systems), WMS (warehouse management systems), and more.

While programmers may not lead the charge into digital transformation, they certainly can be part of the process by making better tools and services for the DT revolution. My favorite phase in the world of DT is “REWIRE THE BUSINESS.” 

Traditional Information Technology often is a culture of NO, Can’t, and Eventually (When we get to it). In many organizations it is disconnected from the business as a growth enabler. I will be honest, one of the sparks that leads to platform changes and the throwing out of several decades worth of code and data by CIO’s is the constant answer of “it can’t”, “it won’t”, and “it doesn’t” when business requests are made.  This slowly over time makes the decision makers decide for features and services over reliability and infrastructure requirements.

Really, it is those who are on the systems who can’t, won’t, or don’t.

Digital Transformation is a two-edged sword, it cuts through the business but also cuts through Information Technology and divides infrastructure from solutions. I want to be part of the solution. DT is also a mindset. It is something you do, not something you buy.

Master of Many Tools

RDi and VS Code are revolutionary in the IBMi world.

When those tools were removed from my arsenal of development, I found new tools and over time developed a workflow for each tool and how to use it for the need at hand. In the SQL world I developed a long-time love for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. To me this is the paradigm of excellence and work environment enablement and organization. Its free and powerful. 

In the Oracle world SQL Developer and Toad are powerful tools. Toad will set the company back a bit and is not cheap, but it is insanely powerful for SQL development, query tuning, debugging, database exploration, and tools upon tools.

Others of honorable mention are SQL Workbench (MySQL), Visual Studio, Netbeans, PyCharm, and the hoards of text editors like Notepad++

There is more but the thing to think about is being quickly able to learn new applications and development tools on your own without paid training and a long startup. Learn how to get working fast on your own and find online resources to jump start your work. Be a power learner and not dependent on a long list of reasons to not be an expert.  

More to Think About

I am going to continue in more detail in later writings on the topics below but want to throw these out there and get thinking forward on them.

  • The importance of deprecation
  • Refactoring as a way of work and a flow within the work
  • Automating documentation
  • How tools like Power Bi and SSRS can enhance the offerings to the enterprise for data services, and how to build great data delivery services.
  • Thinking applications and not programs to improve the code base

In conclusion

If you have reached this point, I hope I have been able to share my thoughts and start some conversations that transform and inspire you to think forward. It is a big world out there and there is lots to keep us busy if we keep moving forward. Together.