well, and the disciplines should include those to avoid ″the hole in the boat isn′t
on my side of the ship, so all is well″ syndrome that can develop.
30.1.3 The Role of Automation
Automation involves the ability to correct, bypass, or circumvent failed system
and network elements and applications, based on defined policies and using
hardware or software functions without human intervention. Automation
improves availability and reduces operational costs.
To put it bluntly, as your environment grows, it will be impossible to manage it
without automation. The number of systems, subsystems, applications,
connections, files, databases and so on that have to be monitored and controlled
will simply be overwhelming for any size staff (if you can afford and even find a
large enough staff). Automation can be applied to all of the disciplines to make
them more efficient; to do this it must follow prescribed management policies,
which can be developed directly from a structured approach.
The following sections describe a set of the typical categories or grouping of
management functions or tasks required, and will identify some of the key
products that support the tasks. The degree to which you implement each
function will vary based on your organization and systems management
objectives; this is just to show you the tasks that should be considered when
looking at Systems Management in the OS/390 environment.
30.2 Change Management30.2.1 Overview
The change management discipline was discussed above as the example
showing the effects of the environmental changes and the opportunities to
exploit systems management disciplines to derive benefits from those changes.
For a migration it is probably the most active discipline initially, simply because
of the differences between the VSE and OS/390 environments - you have to
change things for them to still work. After the migration, change management is
still important - it will be driven by other disciplines such as problems (making
changes to address/eliminate problem situations), performance management
(making changes to improve the performance of applications, or allowing a
resource to provide better performance to applications), and configuration
(making changes to implement or meet the requirements of new levels of
hardware and software), to name a few.
30.2.2 Tasks
The change management process includes the following:
•Collection - recognizing and gathering the changes, so that the focus is on
changes as a whole, and not just on individual changes.
•Assessment - evaluation and approval of a change from both a technical and
business standpoint.
•Planning - creating a plan that defines the steps in the change installation
process. This also requires information regarding the current levels of
hardware (including microcode) and software for system and network
components, which is best met with a common repository for configuration
data.
460 VSE to OS/390 Migration Workbook