Do it Yourself(IMS) Resist the Urge…
In meeting with most IMS customers, most of the old IMS systems staff have for years been writing their own solutions. In most cases the product did not have a tools following so many customers just gave the IMS System group the guidelines and they wrote tools and utilities. The only problem is that the solution then took on a life of its own and consumed resources and staff just to keep the homegrown tools viable. As I go and talk to IMS customers about Ivory and SOA and how easy and straightforward the solution has become, I often hear…
1) have written some of their own or
2) they have taken a few of the “free” IMS tools and force fit them together for a patchwork solution.
The issues that come up are extensibility, scalability and performance. To add a new function to a home grown solution in reacting to a new feature in IMS or try to get an old tool to work with new applications often causes more work than the worth of the actual solution. So it’s time to resist the urge to write your own DIY solution and let the vendors worry about all those details, versions of IMS, features of releases and other issues. Because at the end of the day the IMS systems will be around for decades, but the homegrown solutions will not react in kind. Resist the urge, don’t do it yourself.
